Tanja received a box of promo CDs from a record label, so I think it will be fun for me to post my aging, Gen X thoughts about this “new music.”

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M.I.A is Maya Arulpragasam, from Sri Lanka and London. I can’t claim to fully understand this album or love this style of music but it’s compelling nonetheless. On first listen, it’s a nearly uncomfortable blast of stripped down electronic beats, CASIO keyboard-style bleeps, and scarily clean vocals. However, the album soon displays a true originality because it gets down to the essence of pop music: rhythm. My only frame of reference (which shows my age) is Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance.

There’s a refreshing low-brow sort of vibe here, with old drum machines and samples. Even the occasional effects are the standard ones you’d get on an old guitar pedal (reverb, chorus, and delay). Luckilly, there is really no reason to encumber the music any more than necessary. As a vocalist, M.I.A. is direct, confident, and has enough musical tricks in the form of shrieks, well-timed slurs, or double tracked hooks to make any dreaded Antares Auto-tune or even polite compression superfluous.

But more about the dizzying multiculturalism: the track Bingo in some strange way reminds me of the Clash, with a dog-scratch snare and steel drums relentlessly marching along. Listen to how 10 Dollar beings as an old Atari game, moves into the rawest of music conventions: chant, and evolves into an English-accented lyrics and a verse, almost like a song running backwards. Lyrically, there’s a mish-mash of sexuality, politics, cultural confusion, and terrorism.

Arular is fun, sassy, sweaty, and compact. I think is the album Nelly Furtado was trying to make.

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