Mounqaliba

The Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas is best known to British audiences for her work with Transglobal Underground and Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart in the early-mid 1990s, and in France for success with a cover of Françoise Hardy's “Mon Amie la Rose” in 1999. But her work through the 21st century is maybe even better than that. Combining electronics, chanson, Arabic and North African music, and increasingly jazz, her records have got ever more sophisticated — and this from 2010 perhaps most perfectly hits the sweet spot between all those elements. It’s worth a hearing for the cover of Nick Drake's “River Man” alone, but the structured journey of the album as a whole is never less than captivating.