M.I.A: 'Jimmy'

Ragga, bangra, dancehall, UK hip-hop, grindie and funk. M.I.A certainly ticks plenty of boxes and makes pigeon-holing pretty damn near impossible. The British Sri Lankan genre-hogger is a delight for broadsheet press and Mercury Music Prize judges, who wish to stick a feature on someone who isn't a floppy-haired, Strokes-lite, guitar-twiddler in their pages at least once a year. But is she actually any good, and can she possibly merge every genre under the sun and make anything palatable to the ears?

Well 'Jimmy' gives us the answers and it's a thumbs-up. Coming across like a great forgotten Turkish Eurovision entry mixed with Bollywood beats and Richard X-style pop production values, it's a smorgasbord of disco records, computer game sound effects and Indian strings. The undeniably catchy beats and glittering vocals make this worthy of more than a side-note in the broadsheets and a novelty mention by pretentious Camdenites.