La Woman, Cibo Matto's first album for the label, reflected the band's live performances, utilizing pre-recorded samples and loops.

[1] Throughout the album, vocalist Miho Hatori's alternately sung, rapped, and whispered performances are backed by Yuka Honda's hip hop-inspired sound collages.

[2] In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Rob Sheffield described the music as a mixture of hip hop, dub, lounge, and pop.

"[11] "Theme", unusual among Cibo Matto's discography for its length, is a track which features a relatively normal song sung in English with several Italian words before shifting into instrumental passages and leading into a second half that contains entire verses in Japanese and French.

The only tracks for which the booklet features no lyrics are "The Candy Man", a cover of a song from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (presumably for copyright reasons; the song also has all lyrical references to Willy Wonka changed to "the candy man"), and "Jive", an 18-second hidden track primarily consisting of a recording of Miho Hatori tapping her thighs, for which she is also credited.

[21] Michele Romero of Entertainment Weekly described Cibo Matto as "sonic savants who go nutty mixing disparate ingredients, like avant-garde trumpet with bossa nova bass lines and sugary non-sequitur lyrics", summarizing the album as "kitschy club music, as kooky and lovable as Hello Kitty.

"[14] Select writer Andrew Male remarked on the album's playful lyrics, while noting that the band is "far more musically adept than yer average guitar 'n' shouting comedy act.

La Woman "an ambitious confection of trickling beats and delicately comatose spoken vocals whose only hint of wackiness is the lyrics",[15] while AllMusic's Heather Phares praised it as "innovative and catchy" and "diverse and entertaining".

The site's Samuel Rosean credited the album with bringing western listeners' attention to the sound, deeming it "one of the genre's first big international crossover moments".