You certainly can’t get her for false advertising with this one.
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Alfred Soto: We’ve heard a lot more K-Pop since 2010, and M.I.A.’s latest can’t help but sound leaden in the funny noise and programmed beats department. The last forty-five seconds – Maya going spacey over tabla and lots of space – suggest another direction.
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Iain Mew: Tonnes of the fun stuff, tonnes and tonnes of it! All rattling about in a big box and slamming into walls, but coming out with a peculiar sense of order.
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Daisy Le Merrer: M.I.A. is usually the perfect illustration of why political pop music works best as a series of signifiers rather than as a coherent discourse. So basically this song is freedom, truth and the Public Enemy way and I can’t argue with it. You can’t argue with the sound, too, which is basically what you’d expect from her at this point. Though “can’t argue” was probably not M.I.A.’s aim, this works well enough.
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Edward Okulicz: Oh god, this is just an aural nightmare. So much stuff that doesn’t go together forced together in what M.I.A. probably thinks is a zany bit of creative collage but actually sounds like the composition was finalised by picking a bunch of sounds and samples, writing their names on the backs of coloured pieces of paper, then getting a bunch of children to paste those papers coloured-side up on a wall, then turning them over and duplicating that pattern in Garageband or something. It might have worked if the rapping on top was good, but this isn’t so much sub-Minaj or sub-Missy, more sub-Daphne and sub-Celeste. At her best, M.I.A. can use her voice to accentuate her magpie productions’ rhythmic hooks, here she’s just barking unintelligently: “I’m so tangy people call me Mathangi” doesn’t even count as wordplay. She’s so lazy a lyricist that she throws out little ideas and expects you to link them up into something coherently political. That awful creaking noise that sounds like you’re standing on a bridge that’s breaking apart makes my skin just crawl. This actually causes my ears and brain to hurt like nothing in recent memory.
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Crystal Leww: It’s a shame that M.I.A. so frequently gets left out of larger discussion of rap music and almost never gets listed in the category of “examples of conscious rap” along side Talib, Common, and Lupe. Her music says some shit, but much more importantly, it’s never boring sonically, always so god damn experimental and interesting to listen to. “Bring the Noize” actually says some stuff about the banks and freedom but sounds as arrested and compelling as the stuff that Kanye’s doing right now. M.I.A. has always been a true punk for life, has never gotten old or boring or preachy. So why aren’t we always talking about M.I.A.?
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Brad Shoup: Bringing it from the cargo hold of a jumbo jet, seems like. Or perhaps a Scooby-Doo mansion: doors open and shut, echoes appear and vanish, M.I.A. stalks her prey one room at a time. (The creaking door is my favorite touch; Sun Ra approves.) Lots of stuttering, naturalistic and otherwise. Could be space-filling, could just be another way of wearing you down. But I did not anticipate the freakstyle, fully-pressurized ending. Yet another track where I just need a bit to swoon over and a lot to admire.
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Andy Hutchins: Chic’s “Le Freak” has that “Freak out!” refrain that was originally “Fuck off!”; the words that pierce the whirlwind on “Bring the Noize” include a “freak dem” refrain (really “Freak-freak d-d-d-freak dem,” or something like it) that sounds like a stand-in for “Fuck them.” And what is calling a song “Bring the Noize” that is frustratingly low-key until you crank the volume but a fuck you, really? Maya — Mathangi — still ratatats well, and by the time what she’s actually saying is fully understood, the revolution will have happened. Mission accomplished.
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Will Adams: Strike the eerie comedown at the end and you’ve got a veritable banger. It’s quintessential M.I.A., with a beat that stretches and snaps like a rubber band and vague agitprop – that stutter hook translates to “free dem.” She tends to get lost in the shuffle, but this better be enough to prove that Matangi deserves to see the light of day.
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Anthony Easton: For an artist that sounded on the bleeding edge of vapid politics and brilliant visual sense 5 years ago, now she sounds tired — it may be the kid, it may be bagging the Bronfman, but this sounds ancient and not very justified. It’s not even ugly enough to be interesting. That said, her flow spits, and her voice (actual, formal, what it sounds like) are interesting enough to think about implications.
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