MIA
Arular XL
****

If Maya Arulpragasam's music doesn't make you sit up and take notice, the story behind the music will. She and her mother fled war-torn Sri Lanka when MIA was 11, leaving her Tamil Tiger father behind to continue fighting and eluding Sinhalese government forces. As a refugee on a UK council estate, the teenager discovered hip-hop, visual art and documentary-making, but the spray can and video camera proved no match for what she could do with a microphone and beatbox.

MIA certainly doesn't sound like anyone else, so Arular is messy and unpredictable, childlike and sinister, dramatic and playful. Musically, it blazes out of the traps to snatch at everything in sight. Baile funk straight from the favelas, blaring trumpets, Bollywood airs, fiddly dancehall beats, sloppy electro, old-school spools of sound, twisted hip-hop, striking steel drums: it's a rough-and-ready sonic palette which makes oodles of sense in the hands of MIA and such producers as Richard X and Diplo.

When MIA scats and chats over the top, it all comes together in a big ragamuffin rush of colour and brashness. Such tracks as Sunshowers, Galang, 10 and, in particular, Bucky Done Gun (with its dusted trumpets), leave everything else you will hear this week far, far behind. A great, inventive leap forward that could yet land her in any one of a dozen different places. www.xlrecordings.com

Jim Carroll