SHAKIRA DISAPPOINTS AGAIN

The new Shakira album, Sale el Sol, arrived in today's mail, and having nothing better to do, I listened to it. It's being marketed as her return to her Latin roots after last year's Euro-style dance-club disc She Wolf, which didn't do nearly as well as expected. Most of the songs on this one are sung in Spanish, but if you think that's gonna inspire Shakira to greater heights of vocal passion than she's mustered in the past half-dozen years or so, forget it.

The opening title track is limp rock, with a fuzzy electric guitar riff (by who knows who—the producers and guest vocalists are all credited, but none of the instrumentalists are, demonstrating convincingly that this is a pop album and not a rock record). The second track, "Loca," is electronic merengue, but it feels like it's playing at half-speed. Up next is an even more watery acoustic-guitar-and-piano ballad, "Ante de las Seis," and that's followed by another electronic, beat-driven number, "Gordita."

This is the first remotely interesting song on the album, because it features a guest spot by Residente de Calle 13, and he's jabbing at Shakira, speaking for (I'd bet) a sizable portion of Latin rock fans when he says that he liked her better before she moved to Miami and dyed her hair:

Shaki tú estás bien bonita aunque también me gustaba cuando estabas más gordita
Con el pelito negrito y la cara redondita
Así medio roquerita

Shakira tries to keep up, turning the song into a half-dirty (for pop) duo, but it's got nothing on Residente's back-and-forth with Mala Rodríguez on "Mala Suerta con el 13," from Calle 13's own Residente o Visitante CD. And the album's momentum sags a bit after that.

"Addicted to You" is an English-language song that seems about 90 seconds long; "Lo Que Más" is another boring ballad; and "Mariposas" is a Spanish-language take on the girl-and-her-piano almost-rock songs VH1 plays all morning.

"Rabiosa" is one of three songs that appear in two versions on Sale el Sol. This first one is another electro-merengue track, like "Loca" featuring El Cata, but this one's slightly faster and it could have been pretty good if Shakira's attempts at sexy moaning didn't sound like she was waking up from a siesta.

"Devocíon" is a postpunk track driven by throbbing bass and atmospheric keyboards straight from the Cure's Disintegration, and her vocals are probably the best on the whole record. This is the best song on the whole disc; for pure passion, I'd put it right up there with "Timor," the last track on Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, and the last track of hers that really surprised me (in a good way).

"Islands" is in English, all distorted keyboards and New Wave pulse; it's not bad, but I can't see it being a hit, 'cause it doesn't have much of a chorus.

"Tu Boca," which frankly I was expecting to be another drippy ballad, is actually another postpunk rocker, with tons of bass and a melody that reminds me of Natalia Lafourcade's second album (credited to her band Natalia y la Forquetina), Casa. Shakira even heads into Natalia's upper-register vocal territory on a few lines. This song and "Devocíon" are the two keepers.

The last song on the album proper is "Waka Waka (Esto Es Africa)," and I have nothing to say about that.

The bonus tracks are a remix of "Loca" featuring formerly-overrated, now-forgotten UK "grime" rapper Dizzee Rascal; a remix of "Rabiosa" featuring Pitbull; and an English-language version of "Waka Waka." None of them are particularly good. I used to like Pitbull a lot, but he'll appear on just any damn thing these days, and he always sounds the same. He hasn't been at full strength since his second album, El Mariel.

This is a short album (without the three bonus tracks, it'd be less than 40 minutes long) and not a particularly good one. Two genuine keepers ("Devocíon," "Tu Boca") and one mildly diverting novelty ("Gordita") out of 15 is not nearly enough to make Sale el Sol worth your money.

OBLIGATORY M.I.A. POST

I don't like M.I.A. very much at all. I think she's stupid (and I'm not just talking about her entitled-art-student interview persona; her lyrics are forehead-slappingly clumsy, something none of her apologists, from Robert Christgau on down, has managed to explain away or defend convincingly), I can't stand her fashion sense or visual style, and though this has no bearing on her art, I shake my head in bafflement when people call her beautiful or sexy. (In media culture, once you become famous, you get declared sexy by default, I think.)

I bought each of her first two albums, right when the hype surrounding each had built to a sustained scream. They were available very cheaply at Target; otherwise, I might not have bothered at all, especially not the second time. Arular was primitive and intermittently fun; Kala was less primitive, much more calculated (experiments had calcified into a style), and less fun. But I bought them and listened to them because I felt obligated to do so. Many writers I knew personally, and even more of the writers I read (and considered my peers/competitors), could talk of anything else. I let my intellectual inferiority complex get the better of my taste (at least, where Kala was concerned, since I'd already heard Arular and should have known better).

(This was basically a repeat of what happened to me with Dizzee Rascal, by the way; I listened to a bunch of people whose taste didn't overlap with mine at all, really, but who were getting their opinions printed in places I wanted to someday see mine. I bought both the first and second albums, and liked one or two songs, but was the guy a genius? Not unless that word has been so devalued as to be like the ribbons everyone in a kindergarten soccer game gets for trying. I learned my lesson more quickly with dubstep, because I'd enjoyed various albums on the then-Brooklyn-based label WordSound Recordings years earlier and was able to file dubstep under "similar to WordSound, but not as good, and I'm over that anyway.")

So anyway, M.I.A.'s new album /\/\/\Y/\ came out yesterday, and the big news is that Pitchfork, which had been pretty relentlessly championing her since her emergence, even letting her take over their Twitter account for a day not long ago, panned the record. Hard.

Now that I've actually heard the record, I don't agree. Indeed, I think it's her best album to date. Of course, that's saying very, very little, because as I said at the outset, I think she's stupid and I don't like her first two albums at all. But this one has some pleasing qualities. Its noisiest tracks crib from industrial; there's a sampled air-gun (you know, the kind you'd use in a garage, to change tires) on "Steppin Up" that reminds me of the Revolting Cocks' "Stainless Steel Providers," and the drum assault that opens "Born Free," before the Suicide sample kicks in, is a straight steal from the beginning of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. Some of the quieter, softer tracks remind me of Primal Scream's "Higher Than the Sun."

I don't know how many times I'm gonna wind up listening to /\/\/\Y/\. But if that number is higher than three, it'll be a new record.