MAYA

Three albums in, M.I.A. now seems entirely unclear what kind of artist she is or even wants to be. Having positioned herself early on as a spokesperson for disaffected third-world youth, she now comes across more like a slightly hipper version of Gwen Stefani, "designing" clothes and living a paparazzi-friendly lifestyle with her billionaire-in-waiting fiancé while paying increasingly incoherent lip service to her supposed revolutionary ideals. (Joan Didion summed up M.I.A.'s predicament some decades ago: "The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having.") All of that could be forgiven if she still delivered musically, but throughout MAYA (and no, we're not doing that cutesy typographic thing with the slashes), M.I.A. sounds utterly disinterested. The album's sound is aggressively muddy and monochromatic, filled with random noise bursts that will only sound fresh and original to those who don't know that "Born Free" bites its postindustrial groove from Suicide's "Ghost Rider." Most of the vocals are processed into unintelligibility, and the few comprehensible lyrical fragments are unmemorable. Most disappointingly, M.I.A.'s sparky self-assurance is all but gone, replaced by a sluggish, enervated delivery that's about as fun to hear as the mutterings of the person no one wants to sit next to on the bus.