M.I.A. has described the difference between Arular, her first album, and Kala, her second, as the difference between masculine and feminine - the first being made to honour her father, the second, her mother. In fact, the difference between the two is the difference between bad music and good music. While Arular is intriguing - lyrically dense, sporadically melodic, politically bracing - Kala is an unironic joy, over-stuffed with melody, sharply shifting rhythms and laugh-out loud lyrics. The album shimmers with the unheard opinions and wasted potential of the several billion people who live in dire poverty (a guess-timate based on the billion that live in slums - call me old fashioned, but if where you live is called a slum, you're pretty poor in my book). It hits like we can imagine a gap-year does.
Which makes the choice of 'Paper Planes' as the calling-card single for this album absolutely inexplicable. The song is still wonderful, and it being a hit is perhaps the greatest thing to occur in the hundred-odd years of electronically recorded music. But nevertheless, it's atypical of the album - stable, even sedate. It is, maybe, a fitting end to the album, energetic and colourful - it serves as Monday morning to the album's weekend. Its best lyric is "Sometimes I sing sitting on trains/Every stop I get people clocking my game". Paired with the New York backdrop of the video, this conjours the image of the people that stand out, to terrifying effect, on mass transit systems - the insane, the factor of risk that must be present when millions of people co-exist and commute.
Hearing the first track (the dreadfully titled 'Bamboo Banger'), you notice significant continuity with Arular. We're back in Galang territory, the sparse arrangement, the monotone delivery, the air of threat. But the break comes at 1.57 (in the linked video), when we hear a shrill sample - from then on, the album is awash with voices, through the tropical traffic jam of 'Boyz' to the wonderful novelty of 'Mango Pickle Down River'. M.I.A.'s vocal delivery is hugely improved, with the lyrics thankfully comprehensible, and she even sings, to great effect, on 'Jimmy'.
With Kala, M.I.A. filled the nonsense position to which she was appointed by critics at the time of her first album - 'The Voice of the Developing World'. The simple listing of place names is deployed to this effect, with the album opener giving a 'shout-out' to Angola, Burma, Ghana, India, Somalia and Sri Lanka. That's one song. As tiresome as this sounds, she's clever enough to subvert this later. Jimmy - the only love song she's ever recorded - begins "When you go/Rwanda, Congo/Take me on your genocide tour/Take me on a truck to Darfur". Here, she resembles a Tamil Peter Kay - cataloguing facts for comic effect. In effect, she's going "Remember genocide, yeah? Remember genocide, when you were a kid?".
On the stunning 'Hussel', she again front-loads her best joke: "We do it cheap/Save our money in a heap/Send it home and make them study/Fixing teeth". It's worth stepping back and marvelling at this - over Hoover synths, with clattering percussion, someone is rapping about remittances. Not just here, but particularly here, a whole sequence of transactions, a whole way of living, an immigrant experience, that falls under the radar for most, is being recorded, and being funky.
M.I.A.'s career is currently at a high-point, with serendipity intervening to construct another great work of art in the same mould as her work - the justly acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire - that raised her profile even further through her soundtrack work. Kala is an album of such absurd density and vibrancy, that it's hard to imagine an improvement upon it, but if it is improved upon, it will probably destroy stereos on contact.
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