Forget Special K, for disorienting thrills, nothing beats arriving – battered half to death by jetlag – in the Technicolor tumult of an Indian city. The honking of hundreds of auto rickshaws, the smells of diesel fumes and food stalls, the lurid giant billboards, the swarming bicycles, the animals… it’s a combination that’ll melt your brain if the heat hasn’t got to it first. It’s this sensory – and dizzyingly sensual – overload that Mathangi ‘MIA’ Arulpragasam invokes, so much so, in fact, that anyone who can’t manage an overseas holiday now should just whack on the headphones and enjoy a virtual, round-the-world trip, courtesy of her second album, ‘Kala’.
As the Hindu god of time and death, Kala is a hardcore spirit to invoke, but then, this record is all about movement, growth and transformation. Most of it was written and recorded on the hoof by the self-styled ‘roadrunner’ in India, Jamaica, Australia, Japan, USA and Trinidad and Tobago – all members of what MIA celebrates as ‘World Town’. Her pan-cultural mash-up of street and conventional music styles – bhangra, rap, grime, dancehall, Bollywood and electro – is what first set her apart from her peers and MIA’s genre-defying pop voice rings out loud and clear again with ‘Kala’. It effectively redraws the world map, (mis)matching nu-rave’s synth squelches with bird calls and hip hop (on ‘Hussel’), patching together dancehall, Bollywood pop, handbag house and The Shangri-Las (on ‘Jimmy’) and pitching Timbaland’s baritone rap into the electro-bhangra centre of ‘Come Around’. It’s a brash but cool, Sensurround experience, marred only by the fact that its ‘exoticism’ can seem self-conscious and its sprawling diversity could do with more focus and tighter editing (despite their DIY immediacy, these tracks are pop songs, not field recordings). But we quibble – ‘Kala’ is an engaging, post-everything demonstration of the fine art of the global pillage.
