STRIKE MATCH LIGHT FIRE

M.I.A. “Bamboo Banga” – “Bamboo Banga” has an intense beat, but a thin sound that makes the track seem a bit crude and makeshift. It rumbles and shakes, and leaves most of its space open for M.I.A.’s flattened voice, which is so harshly stylized that it sounds as though she’s sharpened it up like a shiv. She often seemed venomous on Arular, but she kicks off Kala with an anthem so acrid and aggressive that it makes the old stuff seem quaint and benign. On the opposite end of the record, she drops her violent front to reveal a compelling blend of vulnerability, desperation, and antagonism on “Paper Planes,” a bittersweet ballad with a chorus mainly comprised of gun shots and cash register sound effects, but the blank-eyed nihilism of “Bamboo Banga” is only intensified, and mutated into a particularly hopeless strain of sorrow. (The most gutting moment of Kala comes when she delivers the line “everyone’s a winner, we’re making our name” like a depressed teenage girl trying to force an enthusiastic smile.) The album finds some small pleasures between these two bookends, but it mostly comes across like a guided tour of our post-globalized planet conducted by an especially bitter and droll docent. Some of it is fun, some of it is sexy, some of it is extraordinarily vicious, and all of it is exciting, erudite, and on point. (Well, maybe not that Timbaland cameo — he sounds so incredibly cheesy contrasted with her caustic rhymes.) (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)