So I think the new M.I.A. song is pretty rad, though I must admit that it just makes me want to listen to Suicide in the end.  Beyond the Suicide sample, that song really smacked me with a heavy dose of deja vu.  And, voila!, trolling around the internets netted me my answer (via snarky blog comment somewhere): Tricky’s wonderful cover of “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” from Maxinquaye.  I saw Tricky last year at SXSW, and it was an unholy union of the pathetic, the indolent, and the bizarre, wherein Tricky either mumbled into a mic or smacked his sweaty chest like the Hulk, 80% of the time with his back to the audience.  Disaster might be too light a term for what I witnessed.  “Black Steel” was the sole highlight, and it really had more to do with his above-average faux Martina Topley-Bird than anything he did (“Many switch in, switch on, switch off”).

—Lucas