M.I.A. has generally thrived on contradictions. Her music has always been a mash-up of disparate genres from around the world thrown together into something resembling pop music. Her lyrics follow a similar path, generally being a mixture of complete nonsense and less-than-informed political commentary. Her music shouldn’t work but more often than not it does.

The reason for this might be something that M.I.A. would not like to admit herself but the fact is that the songs she puts out are a bit silly. Paper Planes samples The Clash and features provocative lyrics about guns and drugs. It doesn’t really mean anything though, it’s just silly, and that’s not a bad thing. When M.I.A. isn’t trying to have fun, we get something like her last album ‘MAYA’, an overly serious and tuneless affair that nobody really enjoyed that much.

‘Matangi’ does not fully fix the problems of that last album but it does sail a bit closer to her first two records in terms of quality. She has been saying in the press that this is a spiritual album, naming it after the Hindu goddess of music. As usual though, there isn’t a huge amount of evidence for this, unless “My chain hits my chest/When I’m banging on the dashboard” is an unlikely translation of some ancient Sanskrit prayer.

Her less-than-subtle lyrics do at least fit the music that surrounds them. As has been the case since her debut, ‘Matangi’ fits together a wide array of musical styles, often into the same song. On Double Bubble Trouble for example, the track starts out as a reggae interpretation of the song Trouble by 90s girl group Shampoo. It then breaks into a Diplo-style dance breakdown and finishes off with a Bollywood-inspired ending.

This throw-everything-at-a-wall approach leads to the most interesting songs here. Bad Girls is a great single and works even better when paired with the Romain Gavras-directed video of Muslim women driving their cars in a frankly unsafe manner. Bring the Noize is a bonkers mixture of stuttered vocals and booming drums and features one of the better attempts at rap that M.I.A has managed. Other highlights include Only 1 U and aTENTion, the latter of which for absolutely no reason ends every line with a robotic voice saying the word “tent”.

There are quite a few songs that fall short though. Warriors is produced by Hit-Boy (he of Niggas in Paris fame) but doesn’t really manage to pop off. Exodus, the collaboration with Canadian R&B crooner The Weeknd , isn’t that interesting either and for some reason there is a remix of the song included at the end of the album which doesn’t really sound that different to the original, and is unfortunately named Sexodus.

Overall then, this album is far from a disaster but is not exactly a triumph either. Perhaps it’s unfair to constantly compare this to her previous work but when put against the Technicolor excitement of ‘Kala’, this album comes off as slightly dull apart from a few highlights.

Despite this however, there still aren’t too many people who sound like M.I.A. so it is to be commended that on her fourth album she is still making the music she wants to make and not going for any commercial cash-ins. She might not always be the most eloquent of speakers but music is probably more interesting for having her voice present.