Onstage at the Grammys in 2009, nine months pregnant and performing her breakthrough “Paper Planes”, MIA seemed to be claiming the spotlight as she’d long seemed destined to. Riding the Hollywood soundtrack synergy of Slumdog Millionaire, the song irresistibly summoned the damned spectre of The Clash’s “Straight To Hell” in the context of globalised gangsta rap, catching the perfect balance between the hint of subversion and the sound of success. Up to this point she had often been more of an internet controversialist or conceptual artist than a genuine pop star; now she’d found her stage, how would she perform? The pop-art child of both Madonna and Malcolm McLaren, would she turn out to be radical insurgent or careerist playa? Her next album would surely be her most crucial, the moment when the power and purpose of MIA really came into question. Maybe the contradictions in her art and ambition paralysed her, or maybe she just got stagefright, but ///Y/ turns out to be MIA’s weakest LP yet, caught between conformist pop sketches and gestures at a radical past. The title seems symptomatic. Having named her 2005 debut Arular after her father’s Tamil nom de guerre, and the 2007 follow-up, Kala, after her mother, it’s only logical that the artist formerly known as Mathangi Arulpragasam should name her third album after herself, ie Maya. But the self-confident assumption of one-name pop iconhood is tempered by its rendering in the cryptography of computer hackers covering their tracks. The combination of would-be narcissism and paranoia seems telling, particularly in the light of the opening track, “The Message”, a cursory robotic skit which suggests that just as your hip bone is connected to your leg bone, in the new digital body politic “Your headphones connected to your iPhone/Your iPhone’s connected to the internet/The internet’s connected to the Google/The Google’s connected to the Government”. It’s dismayingly reminiscent of late-period Public Enemy. Before her visa application was turned down, MIA had intended 2007’s Kala to be a US hip hop album recorded with Timbaland and Blaqstarr. Prevented from entering the US, she recorded on the fly in India, Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica and Australia, and it was largely this delirious breadth of reference – from Tamil urumee drums to Bollywood soundtracks, from Trinidadian soca to east London grime, Aboriginal chants to indie-kid classics – that made it so irresistible. In comparison ///Y/ was recorded largely in MIA’s new LA mansion and suffers from diminished horizons. The first half of the album shapes up as the club record Kala might have been: “Steppin Up” is all sawtooth and sub-bass with MIA lamely bragging “You know who I am, I run this fuckin’ club”. Lead single “XXXO” is a bloodless piece of club synthpop that feels, with its references to tweeting, iPhones and role play, like a Lady Gaga b-side. And while she’s her equal in terms of controversy, in attempting to ape Gaga’s impeccably classicist pop chops, MIA is always going to come off second best. More galling, “Teqkilla” would love to be some Missy Elliott crunk hymn to hard liquor, but in 2010 comes across as chasing the drunk-girls dollar. Where MIA escapes the club and returns to the wider world, there’s an overwhelming sense of diminishing returns. Teaser single, the Suicide-sampling kiss-off “Born Free” feels like it’s playing catch-up with, of all people, Primal Scream, and was hardly helped by an asinine censor-baiting video. “Lovalot” was supposedly inspired by Islamic Dagestani teen Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, who suicide-bombed the Moscow Underground in March after Russian government forces killed her militant husband. But any reference to her story doesn’t seem to extend further than lyrics that rhyme “Taliban trucker” with “eatin’ boiled-up yucca”. Funnily enough, ///Y/ is strongest at its softest. “It Takes A Muscle” is a cute, pitch-shifted lovers rock cover of an obscure single by early-’80s Dutch synthpop crew Spectral Display. “Tell Me Why” samples a psych-pop chorus that sounds oddly like Animal Collective and taps into a post-Obama disillusion with the lines “things change but they feel the same”. The closing “Space” attempts to mash up the spirit of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with Primal Scream’s “Higher Than The Sun”, finding vertiginous bliss in cutting loose from the networks of Google and the government. “My lines are down” she trills, thinly autotuned “you can’t call me”. Is this the liberty she sings of on “Born Free”? Being free to leave your mobile switched off, ditch your broadband contract and chill with your entourage in a Beverly Hills mansion? Maybe this is the way MIA’s contradictions are resolved – not with an apocalyptic bang, but with a self-satisfied whimper. Stephen Troussé

There is an ocean between the thought and the expression of this solo project from Gary Lightbody. The idea was born in the down moments of six years of touring the US with Snow Patrol. The shorthand version is that it is a country album, in which Lightbody joins the dots between the albums he grew up with – Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers et al – and the America of the Bush administration which was scrolling past the tour bus window. Add REM’s Peter Buck to the studio band and you can almost hear it: twanging, melancholy, like a rock’n’roll bar band squeezing into Nudie suits for the afternoon and skillfully serenading the tears in their beer. But, actually, it doesn’t sound anything like that at all. The Place We Ran From is bloody and dense and dark, and not in the least like a pastiche. There are country instruments – Paul Brainard’s pedal steel adds its plaintive cry, and Buck does the honours with the mandolin as required – but it’s still far closer to Snow Patrol, or perhaps Wilco’s droning distortion of Americana than it is to anything you might hear on country radio. Which, on reflection, is a relief, though it does make it a harder record to absorb. Looking at the band lineup, the sense of continuity with Lightbody’s day-job isn’t surprising. The core group includes Snow Patrol associates Troy Stewart, Iain Archer and Belle & Sebastian drummer Richard Colburn (also a member of Lightbody’s other other band, The Reindeer Section). Producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee helped recruit Buck and Scott McGaughey from the REM family, and Buck even helped the band find accommodation, before recording in the Type Foundry in Portland, Oregon. No demos were exchanged. Buck turned up on time, ready to play. And Lightbody’s songs for weary cowboys morphed into something more contemporary, somewhat more industrial in sound, and closer in lyrical spirit to Willy Vlautin’s broken romances. The geography is important. The opener, “Northwestern Skies” sets the action inside a “crumble down cinema” as a pair of young lovers – probably doomed – shelter from a cyclone. “We can hide where we always hide,” Lightbody sings, “on the blank screen project our lives.” Lightbody’s subject is the America of film and myth, and his young lovers are as full of promise and misplaced hope as Kit and Holly in Terrence Malick’s Badlands. The couple return in the album’s standout track, “Held In The Arms of Your Words”, a gorgeous ballad, stretching towards seven minutes. It’s a slow-strum, which unfurls gently, with M Ward adding crackles of guitar that sound like distant lightning as the melody swells. It’s beautifully sung, too. “This is life,” Lightbody croons, “this is all I want from life, it’s the fervour and the tenderness combined.” This is not, you know, a story with a happy ending. The sense of looking west, and up at big skies, is all-pervasive. There is big weather, emotional storms. You might wonder where the country went. But, really, there’s something of it in the melancholy drone of Lightbody’s voice. He considers this record to be his Letter to America, and if he sometimes sounds like a Soundgarden fan’s idea of a hillbilly singer, he can’t disguise his Celtic soul. There are echoes of Mike Scott’s Waterboys, and Idlewild’s man Roddy Woomble’s folk projects (notably “Get On The Road”, a duet with Zooey Deschanel), but the closest the record comes to Lightbody’s original idea is “The Good Book”, which chronicles a rundown couple (yet again) in a rundown mining town, with him finding comfort in the bottle and her seeking solace in the Book. Editors’ Tom Smith delivers a ghostly impersonation of Tim Hardin to successfully bring it home. The album closes with the murderously epic “Pieces”, a song which snaps in the middle, with the line “a Bible held above me, like an axe” acting as the cue for Buck to unleash a torrent of vicious psychedelic feedback. Kenny Rogers fans may wish to saddle up and head for the hills, but anyone else might be pleasantly surprised. Alastair McKay Q&A Gary Lightbody What was the idea behind the record? It was inspired by a renewed love of country music over the last few years. New country and me have been pals for a long time. This was old country – Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers and Waylon Jennings; all these records that I grew up with, but which I kept at arm’s length. The concept of Tired Pony was of a worn-out cowboy. But when we got into the studio, I didn’t tell them I wanted to make a country record. We just made the record that we were supposed to make. How do the songs differ from regular Snow Patrol material? Every song I write for Snow Patrol is written out of a deep personal experience. These songs are stories that people have told me, or they’re about people I’ve met along the way, and it’s not necessarily through my eyes. The whole time I spend touring the US was during the Bush administration, so a lot of this album is about a crumbling America and the people it has affected and still affects. What was Peter Buck’s contribution? He’s all over every song, sometimes playing two or three instruments. He kept on surprising us – playing mandolin as well as he does, to giving us that wall of feedback on the last song on the record. It was a constant surprise. INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR McKAY