Serial Experiments: Lain

Peerless, prophetic, and almost totally impenetrable, Serial Experiments: Lain is a bizarrely idiosyncratic anime which shines a flickering spotlight on the consequences of our modern-day interconnectedness, and may or may not be ‘about’ a number of complex topics, including technology, identity, religion, isolation, reality and death. It’s also an immensely satisfying thrill ride of disturbing imagery and unabashed weirdness, famed for being bafflingly incomprehensible and deeply unsettling. Lain makes no attempts to allow its story reach you in any form that isn’t the subtlest, most chilling kind of quiet exposition. There is absolutely zero spoon-feeding. Because of this, Lain is often chastised for being so barmy that it raises the question of whether its supposed storyline or inherent ‘meaning’ can truly be said to exist, which I can’t stomach for two reasons: one, to assume that such a dense piece of ball-gripping art was made without any intent or purpose is pretty unfair on the kinds of people who make things as mentally challenging as Lain, and two, it’s hard to believe that the developers would’ve put so much effort into making this series look and feel so awe-strikingly beautiful if they hadn’t had a specific soul and purpose in mind, whether it’s one that can be easily put into words or not.

Lain is an anime series that has no other direction in which to categorise itself in than the broad but brilliant ‘psychological’ genre of anime, which also houses other popular mindfucks such as Death Note, Ergo Proxy, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. But unlike those other examples, Lain is way further out in the stratosphere of intellectually demanding strangeness. The initial setup is thus: Lain is a quiet and introverted schoolgirl who is contacted one day via text message by her classmate Chisa, who not long ago committed suicide. Chisa explains that she is not actually dead, but has simply left her material body to become part of the ‘Wired’, the series’ name for its wacked-out version of our modern internet, where she claims that God exists. Chisa appears to Lain again in terrifying visions, and eventually Lain decides to buy herself a PC (known in the series as a ‘Navi’) and become a part of this strange new electronic frontier. The rest of the story is up for debate – a lot happens, but in terms of what exactly happens, none of us can be too sure. But, like the best David Lynch movies, although you might not have wrapped your head around the exact nature of what’s going on in front of you, it’s made with such a deft and assured confidence that you’re enthralled nonetheless, and can also enjoy the unique pleasure of picking it apart in your mind months after you first watch it. The atmosphere that the show creates is deep and dark and emotionally arresting, and even without going into the arguably less interesting intellectual side of the series, it’s the relentless menace of the show’s feel which makes it completely unforgettable.

The series is also years ahead of its time, either a testament to the genius of its inventors, or of technology’s place in contemporary Japanese culture. Or, y’know, both. Lain was first broadcast in 1998, but the way in which the ‘Wired’ is portrayed throughout the series is eerily reminiscent of a mindset well into the age of Web 2.0 and our now-ubiquitous social media. The scenes that are set ‘within’ the Wired are intensely surreal, a virtual phantasmagoria with disembodied human parts and weird dreamlike personifications. It’s never entirely clear whether the Wired is a vast virtual-reality-type space, or whether this is all animated symbolism of the bog-standard online communication we know and love today. References are also made to how much the Wired is beginning to creep out from the world of ones and zeroes and is into our own reality, which, if taking the Wired to be synonymous with the internet, is unquestionably the state we find ourselves in nowadays, where the internet has come to affect almost everything in the so-called ‘real’ world. Exactly what the point is that Lain is making about the dawn of information age is, of course, unclear. Most of the time, though, it feels as if it’s suggesting that all of this is a bad thing – such as with the inconsistency of Lain’s identity, for instance, whereby she can no longer keep track of her online personality anymore, nor where reality ends and the Wired begins. Also, as the series progresses, Lain’s obsession with the Wired develops to insane heights, as embodied in the progression of her beautifully-designed supercomputer, which grows from a simple desktop PC into a monstrous, room-sized organism. The series imagines a world where humankind transcends itself through technological means, but provides no obvious moral message, which is undoubtedly one of its main strengths.

It’s also worth giving a mention to Lain herself, a protagonist who has little to say compared to most other exposition-spewing anime central characters, and yet she never feels too distant, and the mystery behind her overall objective in the series becomes yet another corridor of interest, rather than a narrative weakness. Her personality is split between her shy and lonely offline personality, and the newfound confidence that she finds – or may have been there all along? – through the vast channels of the Wired, and most of the time she seems as confused as the audience as to what exactly is going on with herself. Her identity as an unhappy loner is made perfectly clear, with her empty, soulless bedroom and her mistake of failing to ‘dress like a grownup’ when her airheaded semi-friends take her out clubbing (to the awesomely-named ‘Cyberia’). It’s clear that there is something special about Lain with regards to her role in the story, although I’m not exactly sure how, as shady agencies, hackers and other underworld figures all take a particular interest in her. However, as much as the show hints that there might be some Neo-esque chosen-one nonsense going on, it’s the scenes of Lain as an ordinary girl navigating a new and unusual world, both in the Wired and in the real world, that work the best. Lain’s relationship with her something’s-not-quite-right family also makes for some of the most unnerving scenes and subplots in the entire series.

I’m head-over-heels in love with this show. Every aspect of it shines with a dark and murky brilliance. The gloriously nuanced artwork, and the production, particularly the sound engineering, which sets every mood with unsettling precision, are all immaculate. It’s cryptic, and yet it’s still utterly engaging. It’s alien, and yet if you strain your ears, you can hear the distant echoes of exactly what it’s trying to say. It has moment after moment of masterfully chilling and eerie scenes and set-pieces. There are so many depths to it, and it’s the first anime I’d point to if you’re looking for something that’s weird, but never stupid. Serial Experiments: Lain is a one-of-a-kind, and though there are a few things you can try and compare it to, it has the distinct honour of being a true original. If you’re like me, and nothing gets you off like the feeling of having your mind rummaged about in and being left pleasantly disturbed, then watching Lain is a particularly special and memorable experience. Others may be turned off by the lack of being able to understand what the fuck’s going on, but I reckon that even if you’re left feeling as confused as a demented rabbit, you’ll still be gripped and entertained by the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. It’s one of my favourite things ever, ever, ever, and if anything I’ve said in the past five paragraphs has piqued your interest, then I suggest you find the means to watch it right this minute, preferably at night and completely alone.

WATCH THE TRAILER (dubbed)

Dawn of a New Blog

So here's another blog, where I'll be dumping any articles I feel like writing, probably mostly reviews of things I already know I'm in love with - I reckon Serial Experiments: Lain is gonna be the first one, then who knows? Expect big, chunky paragraphs and meandering sentences. If you're wondering what the 'old' blogs were to constitute my declaring this a 'new' blog, have a look at drinkaloneradio.blogspot.com. I think the even older ones were deactivated. Be critical if you want, most of this is practice anyway. Praise be to Yevon.

EMA - The Future's Void

EMA, that is Erika M. Anderson, formerly of depressing experimental drug-rock duo Gowns, made ripples on the hipster sea back in 2011 with her solo debut, Past Life Martyred Saints, which was an absolute stonker of an album; heartfelt in its distress, personal yet otherworldly, and packed with gloriously bold levels of variety, from the bonkers to the beautiful. Three years later, she’s back with The Future’s Void, a matter-of-factly polemic title which betrays this second album’s overarching theme of our exciting new maybe-dystopian lives in the Information Age and beyond. The new world order forming around us in the wake of the Internet Revolution has become an alluring concept for artists of all kinds across the globe, all of whom are undoubtedly hoping – as much as they might deny it – to be the ones to truly encapsulate the zeitgeist of this exciting and bewildering period of human history. The Future’s Void is an album that retains the exasperated angst of its predecessor, but throws it into a more ambitious thematic scope, with interesting and varied results.

I was faintly disappointed when I read the album title, saw the Oculus on the cover, listened to a couple of the tracks and realised that this was an album with a ‘modern life’ sort of concept, since I’d fallen in love with EMA on her last album thanks to her offerings of those more timeless and analog miseries like abuse, emptiness and self-harm, which made no attempts to be topical or generational, and were the all the greater for that. Immediately, on The Future’s Void, you can tell that the more personal side of Anderson’s songwriting has been compromised, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and second albums that fail to deviate from those before them run the risk of sounding creatively stagnant, for me EMA’s – and in fact Gowns’ – appeal was the personal touch that made all the heartache in the songs truly palpable. Not to mention the fact that writing any music about ‘the Internet’ is cause for alarm. Shit, my last review was of St. Vincent’s self-titled tirade about life in the Twitter epoch, and songs like ‘Digital Witness’ are a singularly rare success in this area.

But enough moaning about boring things like ‘themes’ and ‘ideas’, let’s talk about the music, shall we? Past Life Martyred Saints had a thrillingly eclectic range of sounds – folky guitars, thundering drums, graceless space-age synthesisers – and this continues in much the same vein here. However, the real warhead in Anderson’s arsenal is her voice – capable at performing a decent tune, sure, but also a material in itself to be manipulated and layered into a variety of forms. Unlike another Anderson, the one from The Knife with the extra ‘s’, EMA doesn’t mangle her voice or distort it beyond its humanity. Instead, all throughout this album, most notably on tracks like ‘Solace’ and ‘Satellites’, Anderson is joined by a choir of herself, creating vocal sections that are lushly put together, and make her raspy inflection all the sweeter to listen to. Whether she’s going grunge on ‘So Blonde’, industrial on ‘Smoulder’, or soft as a whisper on ‘3Jane’, it’s Anderson’s voice which really succeeds in drawing the emotion out of her songs, and every line is sang with conviction – cool, clamouring, disinterested and desperate all at the same time.

The opener, ‘Satellites’, is a marvellously apocalyptic call-to-arms with deranged movements from tragic choral interludes to whistling distortion and a death-knell bass tone. ‘So Blonde’ is plucked straight out of the nineties, awesome or derivative depending on your cynicism. ‘3Jane’ is a lost-sounding and reflective ballad that might just be the album’s highlight, misty-eyed and beautifully sung. On her blog, Anderson described ‘3Jane’ as the ‘lyrical centrepiece of the record’, and talks about trying to control her online image while living in constant worry of having a visible online presence now that cunts like me are finding out who she is. ‘It’s all just a big advertising campaign’, she bemoans wistfully on the record. ‘Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease’. It might all sounds a little preachy, but it’s sang with such bored surrender that it kills to listen to. ‘I get stressed out and I wanna get high / it’s cos I’ve seen my face and I don’t recognise the person that I feel inside’. Anderson’s lyrics are unrefined and directly talk about ‘selfies’ and ‘interwebs’ with an artistic-mindedness that might make some internet users a little uncomfortable, but I find them captivating. Some of the lyrics, apparently, didn’t even make it past being made up on the spot, and I like this rough-around-the-edges quality, as well as the imagery of lines like ‘we just smoulder where the flames went out’, even if the intended mondegreens of ‘earn/urn’ and ‘might lose some fur/my Lucifer’ are a bit befuddling at times.

EMA seems to be reaching for the bigger-sounding tracks on this album. ‘Satellites’, as mentioned before, intends to be as stratospheric as its title, and ‘Smoulder’ is slow and sweeping and satisfyingly grand. Perhaps the weakest effort on the album is ‘Cthulu’, which is appropriately aiming for largeness and impact, but its constant, repeated hook doesn’t generate the gravitas that its creator might’ve originally hoped, and its epic denouement would’ve been more effective had it been built on sturdier foundations. It’s not like EMA can’t write long, huge-sounding songs – ‘Grey Ship’, from the previous album, is a mind-blowing affair, as is Gowns masterpiece ‘White Like Heaven’, but ‘Cthulu’ isn’t great. ‘Neuromancer’ is better, with its stomping drumbeat backed up by machine-gun fire, but all of these big-arena belters, for all their volume, are missing the emotional impact that comes with EMA’s more understated material. Conversely, the ringing piano chords on ‘100 Years’ are as deathly quiet and sombre as a distant church bell on a misty morning, and although Anderson is singing about something as big and important as the state of the world at the moment (‘How it shudders from its expanding’), the effect is serene, yet deeply haunting.

Returning to the idea that this is an album that’s ‘about things’, I’m relieve to say that for all the stumbles that EMA seems to be making in creating an album with a whole lot more ambition than her previous effort, mostly concentrated in the more anthemic offerings, there’s plenty of good shit here, and Anderson’s talent for interesting sounds and lyrics hasn’t diminished since people started learning her name. ‘Solace’ is an absolute triumph, for instance, soaring and cathartic in a way that the grander songs on the album never manage, pulling your ears to attention with a catchy chorus, a bubbling synth hook and its madcap percussive debris. The album ends with its most evidently ‘of the times’ effort – ‘Dead Celebrity’, which could’ve been a whole lot more trite if it wasn’t for its bastardised riff on the Last Post, its climactic fireworks display and lyrics like ‘we wanted something timeless in a world so full of speed’ – all awesome. Songs that reference the controversial selfie and clicking on links might still be hard to get used to as the Internet envelops our lives more and more, and as far as trying to make a topical statement on this generation of avatars and statuses goes, EMA hasn’t quite cemented a totally coherent point anywhere here, but her songs are still as excitingly bold as ever, and her style and lyrics as simple yet affecting as in her masterful debut. It’s not as good as Past Life Martyred Saints, but maybe nothing will be.

EMA - Satellites

St. Vincent - St. Vincent

A track title like ‘Birth in Reverse’ doesn’t create the most appealing mental image, but such is the surreal wonderland of Annie Clark’s imagination, where darkness hums beneath a colourful lustre of charming and cheerful eccentricity. Historically, St. Vincent’s sound played like a neurotic Disney soundtrack; beautiful and stargazy, even angelic, but harbouring a real edge, like a razorblade buried in a bowl of sherbert. In the five years since then her confidence has an artist has skyrocketed, and she continues with the magical strangeness of her unique musical personality, only this time with a heightened sense of awareness and self-assurance. While her previous albums always had a youthful shyness about them, the St. Vincent we have with us here today is her same recognisably oddball self, but the coyness present on her previous releases has vanished. It’s all there on the album cover – staring confidently out at you from her throne, with her majestic gown and her snow-queen hairstyle. This is a self-titled album, after all, and all of this seems to indicate a bold new direction for gorgeously-minded superstar St. Vincent, and here, after four(ish) long years since she last haunted the minds of every hipster in the Western world, she's back with a pink, kitsch dreadnought of an album.

Upon immediate first listen, then, this album signals a change of course in Clark’s artistic trajectory beyond the classically wistful coffee-shop insecurity that we all fell in love with from the Marry Me era onwards, and instead seems to have moved definitively towards a new frontier of futuristic kitsch, a retrofuturistic combination of the 1980s, the 2010s, and god knows when and what else. After all, here in 2014, the world is in the throes of a particularly futuristic-looking and breakneck-fast transition into god knows what, and this album’s standard-bearer ‘Digital Witness’ is probably the most apparent instance of St. Vincent looking outward as opposed to inward, as the entire song sounds, at least from one interpretation, like a sarcastic diatribe about our newfound obsession with validating our own lives in the abstract world of social media: “If I can’t show it, you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?” The spreading tendrils of the internet have been the cause of immense social and cultural upheaval amongst the human race for the past twenty years or so, but so far St. Vincent is the only musician I’ve heard who has managed to address this revolution directly and effectively, as if she’s not even trying. “Pleasure.loathing.huey.newton” she coos in the song where the late Black Panther is “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones” – and she’s right; he’s staring out at me from his Wikipedia page as we speak.

I’ve never given her much credit for this before, but Annie Clark is an incredibly nuanced lyricist as well as a musical prodigy. There’s a lot being said in her metaphor-laden verses and choruses that I dread to think has gone unnoticed by my own self, but the depth of lines such as “a smile is more than showing teeth” and the syllabic revelry of lines like “summer is as faded as a lone cicada call” reveal a St. Vincent as dextrous in the brain as in her guitar-slaying fingers. Her collaborator and friend, New Wave Grand Duke David Byrne, says that “despite having toured with her for almost a year, I don’t think I know her much better, at least on a personal level”, so as a mere musical civilian I expect that trying to find a path via this album into the machinations of Annie Clark herself and all of her possibly intended meanings may end up proving fruitless, but imagery like “headless heroes heaped by the pylons as a careless sun sets on the West” is semantic dynamite, and this album is as lyrically dense and ferocious as Strange Mercy, if not impressively superior. The world that these songs inhabit is bright, colourful, and uncannily strange in its representation of the modern life of its creator.

Annie Clark’s always been talented, there’s never been any doubt about that, but it’s instantly apparent that on the musical side of her fourth album, she’s upped her own creative ante. Her Renaissance-woman arsenal of abilities is sharpened to divine levels; this album is an absolute wealth of sounds, instruments, moods and movements, all arranged, performed and produced tightly and with a clear embrace of the buzzing-metal-and-plastic sound she’s built out of the synthesiser love carried over from the last album. ‘Bring Me Your Loves’ is a stomper; the sound of St. Vincent thrashing around a chaotic chamber of whirrs, crackles and hisses, sounding as far removed from her human side as she’s dared to stray yet. ‘I Prefer Your Love’ is a stopping-point halfway through the album, a break from the laser-light synths and roaring guitars, it’s a ballad dedicated to her mum where she tells her “all the good in me is because of you” (how bloody sweet is that, aw); soft and shimmering and lovely in contrast to the track formerly mentioned. ‘Birth in Reverse’ is noisy and shrill but somehow St. Vincent has this ability to find beautiful melody in the sharpest and strangest artificial sounds, tied together with her voice that is part desperation, part confidence, part siren. The mythological kind.

With this album, St. Vincent has gone nuclear. Marry Me and Actor were sparkling drops of acid wistfulness, Strange Mercy was sadder, sharper and better, and while I’m not saying that this newest effort is definitively better than Strange Mercy in any way, shape or form, it has a clarity in its construction – the observant internet-age futurism, the blending of usual art-indie songwriting with weirder sounds and elements, the swift and effortless transitions between notably different but consistently vibrant moods. You can tell that this is an album that’s going to cement St. Vincent’s place in the pantheon of this slice of history’s acclaimed musicians. She’s ferociously gifted, in weaving her music, in sculpting her own image, in making songs from the (don’t vomit) ‘art-rock’ side of the playing field that can be beautiful, ferocious, uplifting, tense, abrasive, soft and electrifying all at once; exciting to witness, and so uniquely St. Vincent. I’d be surprised if there was an ear on the planet who didn’t find something joyous to step to in this LP, which has proven that if you’re searching for a modern-day musical idol to venerate, you could do a fucktonne of a lot worse than Annie Clark.

St. Vincent - Digital Witness

Xiu Xiu - Angel Guts: Red Classroom

Xiu Xiu are a bizarrely eccentric little enclave of a band, and as such they are an entity which can only cater exclusively to a certain type – and I don’t mean that in some sort of exclusively superior hipster-generation sort of way, mainly because the ‘certain type’ of crowd who get the greatest genuine thrill out of Xiu Xiu are probably not the kind of people who anyone would want to be, and it most certainly isn’t the sort of music to impress your friends with. I’m sure that you can figure out within seconds of listening whether Jamie Stewart and company’s sometimes mystifyingly nutty blend of nightmarish soul-stripping and unapologetically avant-garde weirdness is right up your dark, dingy alley or not. I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of Xiu Xiu, both for their wacky experimentation that makes every album salted with novelty and for Stewart’s ability to create works of absolute harrowing genius; frequently disturbing, sometimes startlingly bleak.

Saying that, however, despite Xiu Xiu having produced some of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and suffocatingly desperate music I’ve ever heard, it isn’t all darkness, they’ve always had a playful side, even if it is a mental one. How else would you explain track titles like ‘I Luv Abortion’ and videos like this one? In recent releases they’ve even sounded fairly, well, jovial (at least musically if not lyrically), as with ‘Chocolate Makes You Happy’ and ‘I Do What I Want, When I Want’. But on this latest release, all those possible instances of not-necessarily-suicidal music have been totally extinguished from consideration. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is the most overtly grim Xiu Xiu album in years. Every track is a lights-off, reverberated, doom-laden sadness exercise. This isn’t a collection of songs to be enjoyed so much as to be endured, decorating their strange and experimental soundscape with impassioned screaming, rumbling bassy synths, chopped vocals, ear-splitting electronic dissonance and squealing pig samples. Make no mistake, this is pure serial-killer territory, and the focus isn’t so much on the sad side of things as on creating a genuinely disturbing, viscerally haunting, terrifying experience, which has always been a common characteristic of Xiu Xiu, but here that beloved element is bolstered to a thousand degrees.

Sounds good, right? I mean, I love dark music, as do a lot of people, and in the past Xiu Xiu have gifted me with music darker and more uniquely fucked-up than much else I could think of. However, just because something’s pushing itself as far down the well of darkness as it can reach, it doesn’t necessarily produce stellar results, and to be frank, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, while it did leave me adequately disturbed, it also left me - spoiler alert - ultimately a little unimpressed. It’s not that the crew aren’t trying or aren’t putting as much creativity into their zero-rules method of experimental song-crafting; by all means, there’s still plenty of successful bouts of madness. ‘Stupid in the Dark’ is probably the one song most resembling an actual song, though it doesn’t lose any of its raw appeal by any means, and as a result it’s one of my favourites – it’s hard not to love the gothic hum of the synthesisers. Meanwhile ‘Adult Friends’ has some joyously fucked-up psychosexual issues (The line where touching breasts ‘is like a lobster crawling over my arm’ is delivered so straight that it works), and ‘El Naco’ is frightening to the point of nausea, leading me to believe that whether or not you take pleasure in listening to this sort of thing probably says a lot about you as a person (It probably says plenty about me). There’s nothing here that reaches the perfection of classic songs like, say, ‘Apistat Commander’ (although that is a difficult one to beat for sheer suicidal brilliance), but fans of horrific sounds will be treated and then some.

In terms of Xiu Xiu’s more quotation-marks ‘artistic’ dalliances, my feelings on this facet of the band’s avant-garde sensibilities are just as ambivalent as ever. A band called Joy Division created similarly dark, cuttingly sad music, but did so with an air of absolute dignity. Xiu Xiu spit out dignity. Part of the joy of listening to Xiu Xiu as a group who express dark feelings (to put it mildly) is that Jamie Stewart and his transient entourage have never held back and have never reined it in – their music is bold and it’s ridiculous and it’s so melodramatic that it almost seems perfectly pitched, and all this is why they manage to reach naked depths of the human soul inconceivable to other bands. This is also their biggest problem, of course, as to anyone who isn’t all that into it, the bewildering artiness that comes with this mentality probably looks like that episode of Spaced, and even to a fan like me, it can get tiresome to have your otherwise beautifully despondent piece of heart-skewering spoiled by the occasional lyric that just pushes it too far for you to go along with it. Here, the lyrics are so overshadowed by the screaming presence of the music that it’s not such a gigantic problem, but in a sense it’s gone the other direction – now the music is so batshit insane that it’s more pulverising than satisfying, though I guess Xiu Xiu have made no pretences of being easy listening.

This album’s undoubtedly another treasure trove for Xiu Xiu fans more dedicated than I am, but for me it’s hard work, and for light listeners it’s probably way too much. ‘The Silver Platter’, for instance, is like watching Suspiria in the dark, on acid, whilst being gently molested. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is guaranteed to be a difficult listen, and not just in the ‘how-much-can-you-handle’ sort of way. There are just a few lulls in its aggravated despair, particularly the moody but almost quaintly beautiful ‘Bitter Melon’, and although I can heartily commend its invention and the sheer breadth of its fuck-it-let’s-just-do-it horror, it’s patchy and it’s a little tiring and all its terrifying elements would probably sound a lot more powerful if there was a little more variation from its unremitting atrocity-diving. Whether you respond to ‘Black Dick’ with unimpressed laughter or paranoid horror is a good litmus test for whether this stuff’s for you. If you’re looking for something upsetting, then by all means, you’re in luck, but even though it’s arguably Xiu Xiu’s darkest and most psychotic album yet - which really is saying something – I can’t help but feel that it’s not one of their greatest.

Xiu Xiu - Stupid in the Dark

M.I.A. - Matangi

I like M.I.A, I like her a lot, and while she brings a wildly varying maelstrom of opinion breezing in wherever she goes, you can’t fault her for a lack of conviction. There’s been a many number of controversies that’ve made waves since we last had an album of hers on the scene - her spat with the New York Times, her ostensibly vicious marital difficulties, and of course that step on the landmine of American puritanism during her Superbowl appearance, but it would be cynical to see the torrent of media coverage, which has become an important pillar of the M.I.A. brand, as making up for a lack of substance on her part. At least, that’s the kind of thing I would automatically assume if I weren’t an M.I.A. fan (I’m bitterly untrusting like that). On the contrary, to me M.I.A. is all substance, and while her outspoken antics are part of the whole reason I do really like her, the oft-forgotten feature of Maya Arulpragasam, her music, is always excitingly newsworthy as well.

While it’s generally agreed that M.I.A.’s first two LPs, Arular and Kala, were solidly impressive slices of original bricolage electronica, not everyone was overjoyed with her last album, 2010’s Maya, particularly for its inclusion of dubsteppy grittiness (I mean, Rusko was brought in as a producer) that I don’t think gelled comfortably with most people. Pitchfork certainly didn’t like it. People were also quick to lambast M.I.A. for her then-ridiculous intro track The Message – ‘connected to the internet, connected to the Google, connected to the government’ – as being on the same intellectual level as nutty, chem-trail conspiracy theorists. I think that was probably the first conclusive victory in M.I.A.’s war against the world, for how wrong they were. But despite its position as a definite step down in quality, Maya was still really fucking good, even if its creator’s melting pot of creativity didn’t boil so sweetly as with the still-numinously-awesome Kala. In Matangi, M.I.A.’s still ranting, still raving, still making batshit crazy genre-bending worldbeat belters, and hasn’t lost a single shred of her magnetic confidence. The grimy aesthetic she took on in Maya still lingers, and will divide listeners as much here as it did then, and she’s still dabbling with currently-fashionable genres (giving a trap beat her best in Double Bubble Trouble), but her schizophrenic beat-hopping, supported by her ever-sarcastic rap-ranting, is still as bewitchingly unique as ever.

In getting everyone hyped for the new album, M.I.A. described it as Paul Simon on acid, as decent and concise a review as you’re gonna get, and the emphasis should be placed on acid. M.I.A. has a varied roster of producers at her command on Matangi, including longtime collaborator Switch as well as Hit-Boy and Doc McKinney, who produced the two best Weeknd albums. There’s even a track here – Exodus – which is simply Lonely Star with Abel Tesfaye removed and a rarely melodious vocal from Maya laid over the top, in a mildly unsuccessful and baffling decision on her part. But the production retinue all tow the line of M.I.A.’s unified sound of audial bric-a-brac, which from what we can ascertain from M.I.A.’s uncompromising public image, is understandable. I love to use the word ‘bricolage’ when describing M.I.A.’s tracks, and I think Come Walk With Me is the best example of this on this record, with its Apple Mac volume clicks and camera sound effects – it’s rough around the edges and completely bonkers, but I can’t help but be swept up in its pure creative enthusiasm. Warriors is a similarly bizarre but successful piece of work, with M.I.A. putting the wild variations from her vocal chords to good effect. I can fully understand the people who are turned off by the indulgent zaniness that this album’s built out of, but for me this is the most exciting thing about any new M.I.A. release – you really never know exactly what you’re gonna get.

There are two particularly soaring triumphs on this album – the first is Bad Girls, which we’ve all heard a billion times at UK nightclubs for nearly two years now, and it sounds just as shiveringly fantastic here as it did there – but the real killer app on this device is Bring the Noize. It’s just as much of a full-frontal assault as her other romances with volume, but where most other M.I.A. tracks are a hit-and-miss result of crazed experimentation, Bring the Noize is a track in which all its elements come together to create a cohesively awesome result. The tribal kick drums, the jelly-kneed vocal distortions, the distant chant, the rhythmic creaking sounds, I mean it’s just as crazy as ever, but it all works beautifully. Maya’s reverb-drenched rapping is at the forefront, and it actually sounds like she’s trying to rap here, which is a risky move considering that M.I.A. isn’t much of a rapper, despite what her befuddling Wikipedia page designates, but luckily, she pulls it off, and resultantly proceeds to exude pure concentrated coolness. And it all builds up to a terrifying crescendo, followed by a darkly paranoid ending, where ‘choose’ becomes a portentous syllable. It’s horrifyingly good. While we’re on the subject of club bangers, Y.A.L.A. has a shouty vocal hook that I originally found just the tiniest bit irritating, but as the swagger-stomping beat kicked in, I found myself falling for it. If M.I.A.’s having fun, I’m having fun, and Y.A.L.A. has M.I.A. at her piss-taking, crunk-as-fuck finest.

But probably the most interesting track here is Lights, a comparatively humble-sounding, laidback and drippingly psychedelic oasis from the rest of the album’s thumping energy. The girl who sings the moon-eyed chorus sounds like M.I.A., but can’t possibly be M.I.A. When did M.I.A. ever sound this relaxed? The sensation of the track is dreamily childlike and a hard-shouldered deviation from what we’ve all come to expect from its creator. In it, M.I.A. leaps between personas, alternating between shroomed-up and awestruck, chilled to the edge of cool, and frustratedly snarky, complaining brazenly to someone about something, the context of which escapes my understanding, but her exasperated, down-to-earth lyrical waxing through a leafy-green kaleidoscopic backing track forms one of the most surprising and startlingly different offerings from the old girl that any of us have witnessed in a while. I’m not sure what the mandate of the track is (except simply to blow off some important steam), but its invention sounds terrifically lush, especially coming after all that noisy electronic rug-cutting, and it’s worth a paragraph of its own just for its sheer uniqueness.

As with its predecessor, Matangi has its flaws. Double Bubble Trouble isn’t great; the beat is passable in its way, but the whole trouble/bubble rhyme slinging is pretty inane. The title track’s alright, but it’s rather on the uninspiringly dumb side of things as well; Only 1 U’s better solely for that bell sound effect, otherwise it’s proudly loud but unsatisfactorily dull. Also, M.I.A.’s lyricism isn’t her finest asset, and even for a fan like me, the manifesto/presto rhymes, the Lara Croft reference, the Drake references, the country-namedropping, yeah, it’s not fantastic, and these missteps are damaging, especially since I know she can do better than this. Even on this album, I can get behind the audacity of lines like ‘my blood type is no negative’ and the ridiculous entirety of aTENTion. But it’s interesting to note that, as an artist whose music will forever overlap with the world beyond it, and her own personal image, you can’t help but admire the fact that even when there are moments of failure, it never hurts M.I.A.’s rock solid image as an icon of no-fucks-given badassery. The illusion is never shattered. And even when she’s not at her best, M.I.A. will always be cooler than you. Matangi isn’t a brilliant album, but it’s a solid piece of work, with some really spectacular highlights, and even when she’s not hitting the seminal highs which brought her superstardom with Kala, she still has the distinction of not sounding like anyone else, and continues to concoct tunes from a mindset that is uniquely her own.

M.I.A. - Bring the Noize

Burial - Rival Dealer

Since releasing the unforgettable Untrue all the way back in 2007, enigmatic entity of genius William Bevan has satiated our cravings for his genre-defying and tearduct-assaulting brand of music with a collection of EPs, all brief in track number, but heavy in content. 2011’s Street Halo was a sedatedly rhythmic continuation of his famously dark atmospherics. 2012 saw the release of the religious experience of Kindred, as well as the cobwebbed night terrors of Truant / Rough Sleeper. Now it’s the end of 2013 and we devoted followers have finally been blessed with a new Burial release, and it’s as emotive and fascinating a piece of work as all that has preceded it.

Burial’s never stuck to one particular template, and if his music reflects anything apart from a kind of urban wistfulness, it’s the producer’s own mental fluidity, switching from one soundscape to another with a rewardingly experimental sense of structure. While it would’ve been just as critically appreciated for Burial to continue building tunes with the chopped-up garage beats that shot him to superstardom, thankfully Burial has taken it upon himself in these recent releases to flex his creative muscles, particularly in these long and varied extended play tracks, and in dabs of experimentation, like the sudden drops into absolute silence dotted throughout his previous EP. He’s trying a few new tactics here, too, heading in a more oldschool musical direction that I’m sure will be met with mixed opinions amongst Burial’s ever-faithful listeners, wherein he mixes things up with thunderous big beat in the title track, and dares to sound at his most un-Burial in the 1980s drum cascade at the denouement of Hiders. But I couldn’t be happier over all this experimentation, it’s interesting to hear how Burial’s been trying his hand at new sounds and new ideas without bankrupting that instantly recognisable sound of his; he’s continuing to change and grow at the rate of a continually relevant artist.

I know it’s fairly cliché to call Burial a true ‘artist’, but it’s such an apt way of describing his particular style of pensive musicianship. Burial tracks feel sculpted and abstractly pieced together like an audial collage, and he’s keeping to his own inimitable style in the broken, unpolished, dust-in-the-cracks veneer of his tracks. The rolling beat of opening track Rival Dealer, for instance, splutters into life, awkwardly finding its footing in empty space which is devoid of a rigid beat. There are several instances in which the beat fumbles out of time completely, which would be an obvious cardinal sin when discussing any other musician, and there are strange elements like the snare in Come Down to Us which sounds jarringly lo-fi, but with Burial’s distinctively fractal sound it only adds to his tracks’ crackly collage aesthetic. The moments in his tracks rise and fall with the fluidity of thoughts and feelings. Maybe that’s why Burial gets under your skin more than most, but it’s also probably got a lot to do with his choice of absolutely beautiful samples and synths. The choral synth that’s the main meat of Hiders is like the warmth of a church on a winter’s night. The autotuned lament that closes Rival Dealer provides tranquil respite from the dark urgency it trails off from. There’s the oriental loop that dances over the dubstep swing of Come Down to Us, and the gorgeously impure vocals that run throughout all three tracks. I don’t know where he finds these samples and sounds, or how he decides to integrate them, but considering the amount of time since Burial's last effort to release just these three tracks, they certainly sound like the result of real, painstaking care and effort.

We also have the unusual pleasure of being provided with a mission statement to go alongside this release, in the form of a surprising text sent by Burial to Mary Anne Hobbs, where he clarifies that there’s an ‘anti-bullying’ message behind this release, which is something I would’ve never expected and is actually a pretty awesome gesture on the bloke’s behalf. Although Burial has a landscape sound that can, at times, feel strange and dissociative, you can hear this theme of ‘everything’s-gonna-be-okay’ embedded here and there throughout the EP – in the triumphant cadence of Come Down to Us and the loving glow of Hiders, there’s clearly something inspirational going on. One of the first samples you hear before the EP fires up is a voice exclaiming confidently that ‘this is who I am’, and the album closes with a speech about believing in yourself despite times of hardship from transgender film director Lana Wachowski (of The Matrix fame). Taking all of this into account, even though the EP begins in the harshest darkness and the whole thing has an edge of night required in all Burial releases, there’s a lot more light shining through this EP than has maybe ever been witnessed in the mysterious tunesmith’s back-catalogue. While I, and a lot of people, adore Burial for his brooding atmospherics and revel in the cathartic grimness of the majority of his tunes, all his forays into new sounds and directions have so far been wonderfully fruitful, and the more positive shade of emotions which he evokes here are just as heart-shudderingly sublime here as in anything else he's made. Rival Dealer is a three-track EP that nonetheless feels packed with a truckload of finely-crafted emotional depth, and continues to show how Burial is one of the most fascinating and uniquely talented musical artists of this or any generation.

Burial - Rival Dealer