Diva down

Natacha Atlas gets Transglobal

by Michael Freedberg

Natacha Atlas's appeal as a singer is to walk an extremely thin line, between the familiar and the exotic. Every time she puts her high desert wail and her Arabic melismas atop a funky club-kid rhythm, she tightropes into cross-cultural drama. Will she oversing the moment, falling much too quickly toward the safety of authentic ethnicity? Or will she fail to step onto the rope at all, downsizing her small soprano till it's barely a footnote amid a barrage of club-cut electronics?

Nervy was exactly how she played it on her debut CD, Diaspora, last year. There, between the music's brief bursts of disco rhythm and a touch or two of Arabic percussion, she soared, distantly and fierce, like an unavailable lover in unquenchable heat. She was Arabic and diva at the same time, snow and sandstorm in one paradoxical weather system. The music seemed afraid to box her in. It drew her back, gilding her delicate melismas, icing her high notes, popping her folkloric qualities and authenticating her pop polish. The Atlas of Diaspora walked on water. She seemed a mystery, a Lorelei, a disco babe from outer space. She was a hit.

There are few such moments on Halim (Beggars Banquet), the second CD by Atlas, who joins Transglobal Underground and Ben Neill this Friday at the Somerville Theatre. Aware of her fame now, Atlas finds her nerves failing as she sings as Arabic as possible. Aware of their headlines now, the men of the band she plays with -- Transglobal Underground, never exactly masters of balance -- lay their transglobalism on much too heavily. The result is an album of forced exotica and overripe club sounds, music much too thick with all kinds of cake frosting and a singer trying to sound more Egyptian than the Egyptians.

The pop music of Egypt today is al jeel, a fast-paced girl's music as surfacy and electronic as Italian dance pop; al jeel girls sing like daughters of Madonna. Atlas sings not al jeel but shaabi, the intense desert-folklore dance music of the previous generation; she's the equivalent of Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, Irma Thomas. Atlas dedicated Halim to Abdel Halim Hafez, an Egyptian singer of an even older generation; and her performances, however overwrought at times, do indeed honor the half-Egyptian/half-Jewish Hafez's mystery of tarab, the most traditional of Arabic pop styles. The difficulty for US listeners is that the book of tarab remains closed; we do not speak or comprehend Arabic and can respond only to Atlas's expressive style.

On Halim, Transglobal's heavy-handed music turns Atlas in exactly the wrong direction -- for where nuance and delicacy allow her to seduce a listener's interest, Transglobal's bulbous sound effects leave no room for any impression but a campy one. Only in two songs, the lush and sultry "Leyli" and the even more lustful, slow-tempo "Agib," does the music draw back sufficiently to let Atlas go it alone. The torrid orchestrations in "Agib" actually add intensity to her plaintive evocation of unrequitable passion. She sighs, sobs, and soars, getting down into and winging high over the song's bluesy prowling beat, fighting the music's hurt with more oomph than any of the new-jill homegirls who're supposed to have invented this genre.

Whatever the faults of Halim, at least one gets to hear Atlas, always a gifted stylist and never a lazy one. But on Transglobal Underground's own new CD, Rejoice Rejoice (MCA/Universal), as with their 1997 debut, Psychic Karaoke, one gets plenty of fault and very little gift. The CD has 13 tracks, with Atlas performing on three -- "Body Machine," Sky Giant," and "Ali Mullah." Even then it's hard to pick her tiny soprano out of the busy techno of "Body Machine," and on "Sky Giant" her subtle flourishes are always trumped by the music's purple disco hooks. And though it's impossible to resist the fast Eurobeat dervish music in "Ali Mullah," it's also unsettling to hear a female singer in a Mullah setting.

But that's the Transglobal style: suck the wide world's folklore into one's club-beat trick bag and send it out to tickle the egos of every head-trip bizarro who can pay the cover charge. The niceties of local honor? Who needs 'em? To these guys, club-life diversity means distorting every tribal genre and reducing all folkloric attributes to one comic gimmick of many. Who says the imperial impulse doesn't still reign where the Raj once ruled?

Natacha Atlas and Transglobal Underground perform with Ben Neill this Friday, September 11, at the Somerville Theatre. Call 931-2000 for tickets.