A love song for the overclocked…
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[6.18]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The Maya LP and its fairly disastrous promo run feels like a million Internet years ago, so you can’t fault people ready to claim M.I.A.’s Comeback Moment. The problem is that she simply can’t give you that. She sneers and swindles her lyrics, finding unshakeable determination in lyrics about unity. She allows beats to batter down into others, like hyperlinks embedded into a sea of hyperlinks. She curates verite percussion from blaring car horns and MacBook volume spludge-noises. And she samples her own voice from “Bamboo Banger” to underline that she writes her own narrative, either colluding or contradicting her opening verse statement that “it’s already been did and done.” The erratic pulse of “Come Walk With Me” shows an artist that’s still excited to fuck with your expectations. Comebacks don’t exist for Maya.
[8]
Brad Shoup: “Come Walk With Me” halves the utterance of a love song between a human and an unmanned aerial vehicle. M.I.A.’s nearly affectless vocal is one of her clearest, but I’m not sure whether she’s hollering from a lawn or from 2,000 feet. Musically, a similar split occurs: she walks the line between trad-rock strum and rave-y break; neither provides any clues, but they keep things interesting.
[7]
Crystal Leww: My brain doesn’t really want to process this. On one hand, the pre-drop is probably the most sincerely heartwarming thing that M.I.A. has ever written. Set over some basic little strumming and synths that drag onto eternity, M.I.A. pleads for simplicity, for giving a fuck, for honesty, for settling down, concluding with “I’m gonna still fux with you.” It’s a stark contrast to the party because the world’s ending, party because we just don’t care anymore narcissism that’s dominated the airwaves since 2009. But then things get weird and we jump into a hodgepodge mess of sounds and samples that borrow from weird places. The British “almost there” reminds me a lot of vintage M.I.A.’s “Freedom Skit,” weird yet appropriate sampling that sounds out of place sonically but totally fits thematically. The weird Macbook blips that denote a decrease in the volume translate into a decrease in intensity in the song back to the sincerity of the pre-drop. It’s a weird song, but I like it.
[6]
Alfred Soto: I recoil from the decision to mix her voice so high that it emphasizes her inability to sing melodic choruses. The best bits, as usual, are the noises she still fux with: yet more pow-powers, hyperkinetic beat, Nintendo bleeps.
[6]
Iain Mew: “Come Walk With Me” starts off like one of the more trance-like, Puzzle Bobbling tracks from Maya, except that the piercing vocal is too abrasive for it to charm in the same way. Then it takes a series of unpredictable turns, which do greatly improve the journey, but it stays strangely subdued all the while. The “M.I.A. is coming back with power” sample at the end and its attendant swagger comes across as bizarre, because power and swagger are two things that “Come Walk With Me” doesn’t have a lot of.
[5]
Anthony Easton: This single — partly an obsessive push towards a kind of sexual liberation, partly a discussion of the new security state — has all of the marks of the flaccid trans-global work of failed late capital and also the resistance to late capital. It’s too long, it’s a bad case of edging, it’s a failed metaphor.
[1]
Patrick St. Michel: Subversion isn’t anything new from M.I.A. — she’s been undercutting her pop with politics since “Galang,” and she followed up her one commercial breakthrough with an extremely abrasive full-length. “Come Walk With Me” opens with what could very well be an NSA reference, and a line like “can we touch base just to discuss agenda” doesn’t ring particularly romantic. It’s wrapped up in what sounds like M.I.A.’s most summery song ever — not in the blockbuster way “Paper Planes” was, more like you could skip to this on a sunny day. Thing is, most of M.I.A.’s best songs balanced politics with fantastic music. “Come Walk With Me” only really sounds good when everything quickens and her vocals start stuttering.
[5]
Jer Fairall: M.I.A.’s stubborn focus on abrasion following the accidental hit of “Paper Planes” has the effect of making this sound like the most deliberate pop move she’s ever made, comprised as it is of hooks that are of the melodic rather than the chanted variety and lyrics so unaffected by politics that stooping to “hands in the air like we don’t care” is not only possible but inevitable. Leave it to her, though, to still end up making a glorious mess of things. The pan-ethnic flourishes appear and vanish without any attempt at cohesion, and the beats, when they arrive, come on so hard that they are genuinely disruptive. The closing invocation of “Bamboo Banga” is both appropriate and encouraging; this is the most fun she has been to listen to since Kala.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: It’s a shame M.I.A.’s so maligned these days, because she’s making some of the most interesting work about these days. It’s blatant, too, whether sonically — that Macbook-gone-chiptune beat, the sonic data dump of callbacks and hyperlinks: the “Bamboo Banger” callback, the stock baby from the “Bad Girls” remix, which is for the pop-literate also a callback — or lyrically. “There’s a thousand ways to meet you now, there’s a thousand ways to track you down, whatever you’ve said and done, there’s a thousand ways to make it count” is an era defined for a novel, summarized in a tweet-sized Franzenbane chorus (use “1000”), sung in the eager flippancy of someone whose love songs are garbled by millennial courtship like so much static (there’s no L in FWB or DTF, though there could be “fux”) yet come out somehow sincere anyway. At times “Come Walk With Me” is too blatant, like if that whistle only audible by people under 25 was a full song; if the scattershot structure doesn’t scare The Olds off (not that it would), the near-tuneless intro almost sounds designed to. (It’s not just Maya’s voice; she doesn’t always sing like this.) And in a way — weirdly, like Britney — the clutter’s predictable; the concept is MAYA, take two, the intro is shareable like an earnest Thought Catalog post, and the switch-up is M.I.A. trying to emulate Diplo but coming off like pairing a pop song with its happy hardcore remix in the one year where that’d seem half-viable. But you know what? I like that concept. Even M.I.A.’s half-viable ideas are more interesting than most.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: Plaintive bobbysoxing ballad goes turnt alien chaabi without losing its sincerity or emotional propulsion. Maya’s studied affectlessness allows the soundscape to grow dense with rhythms and sonic in-jokes — my favorite is when the Apple volume-change noise becomes a stuttered drumbeat — so that the welter of sound stands in for the welter of emotion she refuses to perform, only to enunciate.
[10]
David Turner: “It’s cool, it takes two / so I’m gonna still fux with you”. For such a “controversial” pop star, M.I.A. has always written some of the best love songs. Or maybe the better phrase is “infatuation songs,” because tracks like “Jimmy” and “Come Walk With Me” are more like “You’re awesome, I’m awesome, shouldn’t our awesomeness come together for more awesomeness?” And if you’re M.I.A., shouldn’t everything be maximizing awesomeness? I’d hope so.
[7]