The virtually un-Google-able album title, the artist’s stage name built from gold bricks, Maya’s mouth, concealed by glitched-out YouTube bars — the cover of “/\/\ /\ Y /\”, like the album itself, is at once enticing, disorienting and cluttered. In her effort to deride technology’s ills, M.I.A. may have become the victim, losing her voice behind a wall of industrial sound. On multiple occasions the record falls into disarray, but a few moments of beauty do manage to rise from the techno tumult.

“/\/\ /\ Y /\” opens with “The Message,” a short track reproving the masses’ hyper-connectivity with the Internet, and then it careens into the squeal of saw blades on “Steppin Up.” Right away this album feels different from its predecessor, “Kala.” It’s darker and discordant, lacking anything resembling “Paper Planes ,” the catchy, Clash-indebted killer that turned M.I.A. into a household name.

The move to harsher sounds isn’t necessarily a bad one, but at times there’s just too much going on and the songs become muddled by noise. M.I.A. usually knows the right time to pull on the reigns and harness the clamor, but on songs like “Teqkilla” she tends to cram the meters and the music winds up sounding abrasive rather than textured.

That being said, “/\/\ /\ Y /\” does find moments of harmony, particularly (and surprisingly) on the tracks where M.I.A. swaps her trademark rap style for straight up singing. She may not be Aretha, but she’s not half-bad — there’s charisma in the vocals that’s nothing short of alluring. The first single, “XXXO,” and “Tell Me Why ” are perhaps the best examples, with both songs benefitting from the mesmeric pop-vox choruses. Then there’s the cover of “It Takes a Muscle,” an incredibly cheesy song by Netherlands’ equally cheesy Spectral Display, which M.I.A. dusts off, polishes up and makes cool through her breezy croon.

There’s really only one callback to previous work, the overtly political “Lovalot.” The song feels like classic M.I.A. in both the beats and the vocal delivery, but the lyrics, inspired by the deaths of a Russian/Islamic terrorist couple, expand her usual combativeness to new dimensions.

The subject matter of “Lovalot” will undoubtedly polarize listeners and the same goes for “/\/\ /\ Y /\” on the whole. M.I.A. is reaching for both her militant roots and her pop sensibilities, but while her prior efforts maintained a chaotic balance between the two, the latest turns into a farrago. It’s not that “/\/\ /\ Y /\” is a bad record, but it certainly lacks the same vision present on “Kala,” M.I.A.’s magnum opus.

2.5/4 Stars