Album review: M.I.A., 'Maya'
Within the first minute of M.I.A.’s third studio album, “Maya” (N.E.E.T./XL/Interscope), what sounds like a dentist drill revs up, sure to send an involuntary chill through anybody within earshot.
It’s a harsh, don’t-mess-with-me re-introduction to one of the most talked-about artists of the last few years, a British-born, Brooklyn-based art-school provocateur who spent her childhood muddling through the chaos of a Sri Lankan civil war. Yet a few songs later, she’s putting away “Teqkilla,” in a song rife with product-placement possibilities, and then offering a breezy, reggae-flavored cover of “It Takes a Muscle,” a drippy 1982 pop ballad by the thoroughly bland Dutch group Spectral Display.After two highly lauded studio albums and a breakthrough hit in “Paper Planes” (featured in the movies “Pineapple Express” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” and sampled in the T.I.-Jay-Z hit “Swagga Like Us”), Maya “M.I.A.” Arulpragasam is trying to negotiate a middle ground between her status as an underground rebel and rising pop celebrity.