Album Review: Gedida by Natacha Atlas

The first 90 piquant seconds of Gedida, infused with Mediterranean motifs, Egyptian strings, bittersweet melody and digitized beats, cause forgotten limbs to tap, twiddle, turn and trot. Atlas, an Egyptian-Palestinain-half-Muslim-half-Jewish-singer-belly-dancer, Brussels-born and U.K.-raised, has performed in London with Jah Wobble, the club fusion outlet Transglobal Underground and in Page and Plant's 1998 European Tour. Gedida is her third album. And perhaps, enough. Atlas' climactic introduction is just a prelude to ten long, indistinguishable tracks. Gedida has everything--hip hop, London dance beats, samplings from Rob Base & E-Z Rock, industrial tones, traditional chants, Egyptian indigenous bluesy pop and Arabic lyrics about truth and political oppression--but these flavors are over-fused and hyper-blended into watered-down mush. In including too much, Gedida is mostly empty and ineffective. It doesn't make you want to dance, it makes you want to shop. Perhaps a late-'90s Ofra Haza, Atlas has produced ideal background music for burning incense, vintage clothes or those times when you want to impress guests with slightly exotic, non-English, just sexy-enough, worldliness.