Going up!

British soul singer Jamie Lidell takes flight with something new, something old

Jamie Lidell abandoned electronica and embraced Motown-style soul on his latest release, ''Jim.'' (Matias Corral)

Call it going forward in reverse. Tapping the past to get to the future would be another apt way to describe Jamie Lidell's music. Ask the British-born singer-songwriter what, exactly, he does and where he fits in, and he'll say - tongue perhaps not quite so firmly in cheek as one might think - that he considers himself "a nostalgic pioneer."

"There's a different kind of energy that I'm going for," Lidell says over the phone, en route to a show in Seattle amid a downpour ("It always rains in this part of the country, doesn't it?"). "It's just a question of finding a path that feels like it's leading somewhere and that's interesting - that's fruitful, as opposed to fruit that gets moldy."

Improbable as it may sound, Lidell's latest album, "Jim," a sumptuous, neo-soul-soaked affair steeped in the alternately slick and gritty urban R&B of late '60s/early '70s Motown, feels like a welcome blast of fresh air. It doesn't hurt that "Jim" opens with "Another Day," a welcome-to-the-morning slice of Stevie Wonder-esque pop replete with bird chirps, hand claps, an uplifting piano, and a soulfully upbeat vocal by Lidell. Those gospelly background voices are pretty hard to resist, too.

Although one might be tempted to add the album to the list of discs made by English singers mining American soul music - James Hunter, Duffy, and, most famously, Amy Winehouse are the latest in a trend that dates back to Dusty Springfield (and let's not forget Paul Young, people) - Lidell casually suggests that he got there first. Among the current crop, anyway. His previous album, "Multiply," came out almost four years ago, well before Winehouse walked away with an armful of Grammys.

"I've often been asked, 'What's with this English soul thing?' And when I did 'Multiply,' there wasn't one, really," says Lidell, 34, who hits the Paradise Rock Club this Sunday with Janelle Monae opening. "I mean, of course, there's been a lot of people doing Motown stuff for years and bringing it back, and it never goes away. It's a form of pop music that's an irresistible combination of elements, which [Motown founder] Berry Gordy turned into a hit formula. Now it's re-emerging for the modern ear.

"It's funny, because I never really did think of myself as being a kind of leader," Lidell adds. "But it still hasn't gotten the recognition that all those ladies have. There's something about doing that music and being a lady that captures the imagination."

Lidell is selling himself a tad short. What captures our imagination about Lidell, besides a striking, sandpaper-and-honey voice that can convincingly take on a ballad that sounds like Sam Cooke fronting the Flamingos ("All I Wanna Do"), is how he got here. This is the forward-in-reverse part.

Prior to discovering his soul side and re-emerging - or re-inventing himself - as a suit-wearing lover man channeling Otis Redding (check out "Wait For Me" on "Jim") and Smokey Robinson ("Out of My System"), Lidell had built a reputation as something of an electronic music-minded mad scientist, a cut-and-paste remixer and chop-shop producer. He recorded some sessions with Beck ("I don't think he used any of it, but I also tap danced for him," he jokes), collaborated with singer-songwriter Feist, and led his own outfit called Super Collider. Sure, the funk was there. But nothing so overt as the statement of intent that "Jim" announces.

Still, he sees a key similarity ("my voice") between the old and the new stuff.

"In fact, when I did 'Multiply' it really was electronic, and it was only towards the end of the writing process that I thought I'd turn it around and make it more - for want of a better word - organic," Lidell says. "And that gave me a little bit of an itch to make something even less electronic, I suppose. Oddly enough, it was new ground for me, going back in time. I started out electronic and missed out on the sweetness of things like microphones, instruments, people playing, that good old stuff that makes you happy."

Hence the album title "Jim," a work he named on the spot over dinner with friends who asked him what he was going to call his latest collection. "I wanted to keep it personal as I felt the material was getting more personal and more stripped down - less machines, more me," says Lidell. "So the most 'me' possible would be my name, really. It's not quite my name, but it's part of my name [James]."

An equally accurate title might have been "Chameleon." Lidell suspects he'll reconfigure his approach again at some point because, as he puts it, "getting into a comfort zone is not a creative act." But whatever direction's next, the singer sees it as all part of a creative continuum.

"That's what ties it all together - the voice, which in the beginning was organic but disguised and cloaked in electronic stuff," Lidell says. "So I guess I'm slowly removing the veil."