CD reviews: M.I.A. and Alejandro Escovedo

M.I.A., "Maya" (Interscope)

"You know who I am," Maya Arulpragasam, or M.I.A., raps in "Steppin Up" on her third album. One song later, in "XXXO," she sings, "You want me to be somebody who I'm really not."

On her two previous albums, M.I.A. and her producers scouted and adapted some brutal, distorted, exultant beats spawned in slums worldwide. Those tracks backed lyrics that slung references to international strife and terrorism as well as self-assertion. The albums were smart, fearless, disruptive, playful, raw, dense with ideas and -- as proved by "Paper Planes," heard in "Slumdog Millionaire" -- catchy. M.I.A.'s graphics and fashion sense only made her more vivid.

She still glances at global flashpoints. In "Lovalot," over a subdued but taut percussion collage, she alludes to the widely seen photograph of a teenage "black widow" Russian suicide bomber. Other songs on "Maya" revolve around the Internet as a zone of surveillance and miscommunication. But M.I.A. also descends to more standard hip-hop concerns: stardom, romance, dropping brand names and getting drunk. Her new musical frontier is singing full-length melodies, with help from Auto-Tune. That's not so bad; only "XXXO," by far the most conventional club-style song in M.I.A.'s catalog, sounds like an attempted pop sellout.

Even when M.I.A. is dumbed down, her ear saves her. The album's producers mingle propulsion and attack in tracks that can be fanatically layered or sparse but effective. M.I.A.'s drunk-on-the-dance-floor song, "Teqkilla," is tambourine-shaking, synthesizer-blipping, sample-chirping mayhem. "Born Free" recaptures the confrontational energy of the group it samples, Suicide. The rhythm track to "Steppin Up" starts with power drills and then thuds, whirs, power-chords and generally slams onward.

We need a new word for the 21st-century performer who's not a virtuoso, but who, like Madonna or M.I.A., makes collaborators outdo themselves: a beat-shopper, or a catalyst, or a selector. M.I.A. made her name with her complex juxtapositions of the first world and third world, verbally and sonically. On "Maya" she gets by instead with her instincts as, for lack of a better word, a musician.

JON PARELES, NEW YORK TIMES

Here, Austin, Texas, stalwart Escovedo, again working with producer Tony Visconti and frequent co-writer Chuck Prophet, turns up the volume on a bracing set of lovelorn tunes that gather wall-of-sound force, then break for interludes of contemplative beauty. Highlights include "Tula," a touching tribute to the late Mississippi novelist Larry Brown; the rousing "Faith," a heart-swelling duet with Bruce Springsteen; and "Fort Worth Blue," a delicate instrumental elegy to Stephen Bruton, the guitarist-producer who died last year.

DAN DELUCA, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER