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As much a positive validation of a multicultural Britain as you're likely to hear all year, ARULAR the debut album from M.I.A., a Sri Lankan refugee living in London, also puts a much needed female spin on the male oriented UK garage scene dominated by outfits like The Streets and So Solid Crew.
Coming on like Missy Elliot without the bling and brought up on a London housing estate, this is a sound that can only have emerged from the UK, with that low-key Englishness informing every beat and merging with the more exotic world grooves. A hectic soundclash of bangra, dancehall, garage, two-step and hip-hop, ARULAR, mixes the styles but is held together by a grimy lo-fi punk attitude.
PULL UP THE PEOPLE slinks along on stuttering beats and dirty bass, M.I.A.
laying down her vocals in a mash up of hip-hop and soulful melodies that veer between bangra and r 'n'b. The Rocky sampling, BUCKY DONE GONE, with its "London/Quieten down/I need to make a sound" pronunciations, announces M.I.A. proper. Sounding like the anarchic soundclash you'd expect to hear coming out of London in 2005, this is the inevitable coming together of sounds, cultures and styles that revigorates your excitement in modern dance music.
SUNSHOWERS, the standout pop moment here, has one of those insanely catchy choruses, but here roughed up by ragged beats and a thick layer of grime that'll see it making a Streets like bid for pop chart action. The similarly chart bound FIRE, FIRE rolls along on more chunky beats and deep down grooves, with a lyrical flow that namechecks The Beastie Boys, The Pixies, Lou Reed and Timbaland proving that the list of influences that inform ARULAR go way beyond the usual suspects.
Lyrics like "somewhere in the Amazon/they're holding me ransom" on AMAZON point towards Maya's fascinating life so far, something that infuses her music with a colourful worldview and level of interest above the average lovesick/heartbroken lyricism that runs through the majority of pop songs you'll hear.
ARULAR represents the UK music scene as it should be in 2005, full of fresh ideas and multiple soundclashes. Like The Streets infused with a female viewpoint and multicultural influence, M.I.A. breathes new life into the UK garage scene, something that's been slowly and painfully dying for years under macho posturing and stale ideas. Thankfully free of the obvious bids for stardom like The Streets' Dry Your Eyes, ARULAR is a collection of songs that do things of their own terms skipping between dirty beats, bangra injected garage and the grimier edge of hip-hop and R n B. M.I.A. deserves to be a big star as 2005 draws on, and with an album this strong its a pretty safe to say she's well on her way.

Hailing from Sri Lanka via London, M.I.A. is Maya Arulpragasam.
April 18th sees the arrival of her eagerly awaited debut album, 'Arular' - one of the most politicised party albums you're likely to hear.
M.I.A.'s lauded mixtape (co-produced with Diplo), 'Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol.1', of late last year best hinted that 'Arular' was going to be quite an event. The good news is that, with its immediacy, originality and sheer audacity, it's nothing short of essential listening.
In just forty minutes, M.I.A. has produced an unparalleled mongrel mix of hip-hop, ragga, dancehall, electro and, dare we say, punk. Delivered in her spitting, scattergun style, topics like teenage prostitution, poverty, war and consumerism all play off each other against a devastating backdrop of dislocated beats and pounding basslines. 'Arular' has unwittingly provided a much-needed shot in the arm for dance music.
Maya was born Mathangi Arulpragasam in Hounslow, London, the second of three children. Both her parents are Sri Lankan; her father was in London working as an engineer and her mother was working on a temporary visa. When she was six months old, the family moved back to Sri Lanka where her brother Sugu was born.
Mayas parents lived separately because of her father's increasing commitment to Tamil politics and the movement for Independence. As war broke out, her Dad would occasionally visit them, usually in secret or hiding from the army because he was becoming a known figure in the Tamil rebellion. It became unsafe for the family to stay in Sri Lanka and so Maya's Dad sent tickets for them to relocate to Madras in India.
From here, Maya and her sister Kali began to attend school, while their Dad travelled back and forth between India and Sri Lanka, staying for months at a time in each. After a couple of years, as the Tamil rebellion grew, her Dad's visits became less frequent and reliable, and the family began to struggle with money. They moved back to Sri Lanka again.
At the height of the Civil War, the violence began to claim the lives of friends and relatives and the family made many failed attempts to escape the country and seek refugee status elsewhere. Eventually, they successfully made it through the borders and on to London. Maya's family were housed on a council estate in Morden, where she began to learn English. Maya attended school in Wimbledon and then Hammersmith College, Middlesex University and Central Saint Martin's School of Art, where she studied Fine Art/Film. She is currently living in Bermondsey, London.

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