M.I.A. ‘M.I.7’ Review: An Album That Merely Gestures Toward Enlightenment

On M.I.7, M.I.A.’s talent for turning musical collage into confrontation has soured, resulting in a series of grand statements that treat invocation itself as substance. The album is framed in the language of revelation, as its song titles nod toward prayer, divinity, fate, and totality. Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir is featured on a couple of tracks, and regal trumpets blare across a slew of interludes. But while M.I.7 positions itself at the threshold of some spiritual unveiling, the actual music rarely bears it out.

M.I.A. promises ascent, rupture, or illumination, but what should register as visionary—akin to the encounter with Jesus Christ the artist claims to have experienced in 2017, which led to her become a born-again Christian—often feels barely considered. M.I.7 features a swarm of interludes, seven in all, that are strewn across the album like ceremonial markers. In theory, they might have functioned as connective tissue, binding the album’s religious and apocalyptic imagery into a single suite. In practice, they mostly chop the listening experience into pieces, their sound typically sharper, brighter, and more attack-heavy than the proper songs.

The interlude “Trumpet 7” is the starkest example of that dynamic, a blast of brittle noise that hits like a warning siren. The remaining interludes serve much the same role: abrupt, admittedly adrenaline-pumping interruptions to the album’s already fragile sense of momentum masquerading as dramatic architecture. By the album’s midpoint, these recurring horn figures stop reading less as motifs than as evasions, as if M.I.A. doesn’t trust the actual songs to carry her ideas without flares of symbolic importance interspersed between them.

That mistrust is hard to dismiss, since the songs themselves are oddly inert. “Jesus,” despite its choir and all the lift it seems to promise, is strikingly earthbound: Rather than explode upward, it trudges forward on a slow, heavy pulse, its muted percussion and thick harmonic bed yielding a dark arrangement that never quite reaches transcendence. Likewise, “Calling” arrives with so little force that never reaches the emotional peak its title seems to promise.

M.I.7’s stronger tracks—such as “Money” and “Circle,” which boasts the unintentionally hilarious lyric “Every day has an hour/Every hour has a minute/Every minute has a second/Time starts now”—cut through the surrounding haze with more percussive bite but don’t quite escape the album’s broader inertia. “Ride the Sky” comes closest to breaking the pattern, not so much by deepening the album’s ideas as by finally injecting some needed force into them, surging with more moxie than anything else here.

What makes M.I.7 frustrating, then, isn’t that it leans on iconography to evoke a sense of spiritual gravity, but that it doesn’t match it with songs of equal weight. That might have made for an interesting examination of doubt, but M.I.A. is content to offer gestures, however sincere, that feel scarcely meaningful. Even closer “30 Minutes of Silence” refuses the discipline of its titular premise, its more than half-hour runtime punctured every few minutes by bursts of high-frequency noise. By the end, M.I.7 reveals itself not as the document of an artist communing with the absolute, but as an album content to signal spiritual depth rather than realize it.