Maja (pronounced “MAY-ja” by the way–a surprise to me) isn’t incompetent, but I felt his even tone throughout each track conveyed boredom, and I could only echo that temperament when listening, often completely tuning out the music as it rolled on smoothly.

The lyrics are often clever or cleverly pronounced, but the lack of any emphasis at all made paying attention to them a chore. The one exception to this impression was “Hip Hop Daikou” which has nice, minimal beats, a fun chorus, and more of the punchy flow that I find engaging. If I understand correctly, it’s outside of the Bleach-themed set of tracks on the release, explaining the scattered references to other anime and video games.

The samples were totally lost on me. Not only did they fail to add anything to the overall composition because of language, but I didn’t recognize any of them, though one guy sounded a lot like Gendo Ikari in Neon Genesis. Wait, that was indeed the same guy. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Maybe a Bleach fan would get a lot more out of this album, but for me, the so-so musical aspect combined with complete lack of familiarity or interest in the theme made this a very hard album to get through, and after a few subsequent attempts it didn’t get any better.

However, I do look forward to checking out what Maja does next. I think if he were to create a more personal musical project, it would result in a very interesting and engaging album. As a whole, Bleach’d Out was not for me.

Maja – Hip Hop Daikou

Maja on ReverbNation