Back in 2005 MIA's militant, art-house blend of baile funk, grime and electro stood pretty much alone. Only two years later, bands such as Brazil's CSS or the Angolan-Portuguese Buraka Som Sistema are happily accepted into the fold. So where does that leave ex-St Martins student Mathangi 'Maya' Arulpragasam, perhaps the only pop star to have been nominated for both the Mercury and Alternative Turner Prizes? Her answer appears to have been to expand her horizons further than the London and Sri Lankan street life that populated her debut, Arular (named after her father, whereas Kala takes her mother's name).
Mostly, it works. Second single 'Jimmy' is Hi-NRG Asian pop with huge, fast disco strings, and in more typical MIA style - after all, this is the woman whose 'Sunshowers' was banned by MTV until she removed a reference to the PLO - an under-the-radar rhyming of 'Darfur' and 'genocide tour'. It's infectious and ridiculous and helps shift the psychic territory of the record way out of Arular's orbit, despite leaving production in the same hands: London's Switch and, on one track, Diplo.
Perhaps her horizons were expanded by exposure to genuinely mainstream pop success. After all, since her last record she's toured North America with Gwen Stefani and guested on albums by Missy Elliott and Timbaland. Plus she actually walks her internationalist talk, something assisted by her long-term tussle with US immigration over her working status. Kala, then, contains tracks recorded in India, Japan and Trinidad and features car sirens, village choirs and radio fuzz, along with Nigerian MC Afrikan Boy and the Wilcannia Mob, a group of Aboriginal street kids with accents that are rooted closer to Dick Van Dyke's cockney than everyday Australian.
A more commercial slant (although in a world where previously niche acts such as the Gossip or Kate Nash can enjoy mainstream success, the term is relative) is immediately clear: the opener, 'Bamboo Banga', is supposedly based on Jonathan Richman's proto-punk classic 'Roadrunner' but actually sounds more like Yello's 'The Race' taking a detour through a dog-barking, music-blaring street somewhere hot and dusty.
The most interesting tracks are those where she turns off her incrementally irritating MCing and sings instead. Arulpragasam will never be an Aretha Franklin. Hey, she'd probably never even be a Madonna where vocals are concerned, but Talking Heads-meets-Cyndi Lauper banger '$20', 'The Turn' (produced by Baltimore hotshot Blaqstarr) and album highlight 'Paper Planes' both soften and deepen Kala into a record that you'll actually want to play through. The latter is a career high, sounding like an internationalist indie record directed by a teenage, fun-loving Gorillaz - which makes you rue the fact that guns sound so good on record. Although any arguments that someone like Arulpragasam, who has first-hand experience of civil war and random violence thanks to her Tamil separatist father, should be more responsible about glamorising violence are neatly put to bed by the fact that each gun shot and reload is followed by the sound of a cash till ringing.
In fact, it's the tracks that sound like they fell off the back of Arular (the underwhelming first single 'Boyz' or 'World Town') that stop the record from sounding like a total triumph. Kala contains all that is good and bad about MIA. There are the terrible lyrics ('I like fish and mango pickle/ When I climb trees them feet do tickle') and more than a few moments where her one-style-fits-all MCing grates, but there's also the politics that no one else would touch, an intelligence, colour and humour, and the added benefit of centrifugally heavy production. Skip a couple, and you're in for a treat.
Download: 'Paper Planes'; '$20'; 'The Turn'