Mya Arulpragasam’s voice, always at the centre of the 30-year-old’s continent-hopping, avant-garde, beat-happy songs, is not always easy to take or, for some, to take seriously. Despite being universally praised as a harbinger of pop’s future, M.I.A. (as Arulpragasam, the London-born, frequently displaced daughter of Sri Lanka, is more economically known) often is dismissed as a vocalist. Even in reviews that acknowledge Kala — her second album that hit retail outlets last week — words such as “flat’’, “sulky’’ and “limited’’ describe M.I.A.’s rapping and singing. Kala draws on the widest possible array of sounds and nightclub trends. There are Bollywood hooks and Tamil Nadu village drums; the spaciousness of dub and the relentlessness of Baltimore thump beats. So maybe what comes out of M.I.A.’s mouth isn’t the key to her music. Yet to dismiss her voice is to miss the whole point of Kala. The album hits hardest by embodying the process by which certain voices are bottled up and distorted within the global noise of what M.I.A. calls “Third World Democracy’’. Although she has dared to represent the ‘Third World’, some people feel that her year at a fancy London art school disqualifies her from that position, despite the impoverishment and exile she endured as a youth because of her father’s involvement with Sri Lanka’s militant Tamil Tigers. So Kala is powerful if only because M.I.A. knows firsthand how a marginalised voice sounds.-Ann Powers (LAT-WP)
