*** Natacha Atlas

GEDIDA

(Mantra/Beggars Banquet)

Someday, perhaps, the lady's handlers in Transglobal Underground will again release an entire Atlas CD as eloquent as Diaspora. On her third album, however, as on last year's Halim, one needs accept a whole lot of songs Arabicized and trip-hopped in search of the one or two that allow Atlas to be what she really is: the decade's lushest and most persuasive singer of exotic, romantic dream pop.

On Halim, that song was "Agib," the last of 12 tracks. This time the high drama comes first: her version of Françoise Hardy's "Mon amie la rose" -- in which Atlas's olive-garden French meets the most fragrantly Arabic shaabi beat imaginable, expressing all the grace in Hardy's lyric of love and death, the short-lived intensity of the first leading to the unrequited sad permanence of the second. Atlas touches the ecstatic summit, but though Gedida offers other moments of symphony-and-Cairo-talk elevation -- "Bahlam," "Ezzay," "The Righteous Path," and especially "Bastet" (a clever blend of shaabi and rap) -- none reaches the heights of "Mon amie." Gedida is less disfigured by tricked-up rhythms and costume-drama Arabism than Halim, but too much of it lacks the fragile music and vocal vulnerability that made Diaspora an album to love.

-- Michael Freedberg