M.I.A September 20, 2005

You've never heard anything like M.I.A. -- the sound of jump-rope rhymes in a war zone. She blew out of the London electro underground last year with her indie debut single, "Galang." M.I.A. chants the hook "London calling/Speak the slang now" while she plays with her cheapskate beatbox and amps up her minimal buzzes and bleeps into monstrously cool explosions. It sounds like Bow Wow Wow shooting bottle rockets into a vintage Ms. Pac-Man machine to scare the quarters out. M.I.A.'s long-awaited full-length debut, Arular, is every bit as stunning as "Galang": weird, playful, unclassifiable, sexy, brilliantly addictive.

(via RollingStone.com)