Keren Ann's moody 'Nolita' is quietly seductive

Keren Ann is a singer-songwriter, a golden-throated guitar-strummer who pens simple changes and soothing melodies. As a young girl, she taught herself Joni Mitchell songs. She plucks her strings with familiar delicacy, rarely smiles, and sings about love and regret. And yet none of that genre's musical cliches apply to the 30-year-old artist's languid, urbane songs.

The Dutch-Javanese-Russian-Israeli musician spent her early childhood in Holland and Israel, moved to Paris at 11, and currently lives part-time in New York. She releases her second bilingual album, ''Nolita," today on the Metro Blue label, an imprint of Blue Note. Titled after her adopted Manhattan neighborhood where she wrote much of the album, the collection straddles the Atlantic, marrying Baroque chamber pop and chansons français (Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy are her heroes) with downtown folk.

The lovely fusion is shot through with a thoroughly modern subtext -- trip-hop flavors and flashes of electronica -- and anchored by Keren Ann's voice: a cool, rippleless instrument that rarely rises above a whisper. Overt emotions are nonexistent, arrangements are understated, and Keren Ann's singing is cosmically introverted. But there's a clarity to her aesthetic that's strangely intimate, and it speaks in the universal language of a slow-burning mood.

''Nolita" is, in a word, gorgeous. While Keren Ann sings in both French and English, her music is far more cafe than coffee house, more suitable for a seduction than an earnest conversation. It's fleshier than its predecessor, 2003's ''Not Going Anywhere," in both style and substance. Where Keren Ann stuck mainly to hushed lullabies and acoustic settings on the earlier album, on the new disc she explores country minimalism (''Chelsea Burns," ''Roses & Hips"), heavy feedback (''One Day Without"), a jazzy Brazilian feel (''Que n'ai-je?"), and, on the narcotic breakup tune ''For You and I," something that might be described as trance-folk.

Her only misstep is the closing track, ''Song of Alice," a spoken-word portrait of ''the patron saint of 23rd street" read in pretentious, faux-halting tones by Sean Gulette. Otherwise Keren Ann, who produced the album herself, displays a remarkable feel for refined instrumentation that's simultaneously stripped-down and lush.

That said, there's a constancy of tempo and volume on ''Nolita," a profound quietude that many will find numbing. Keren Ann's sonic palette is expansive, but it's rendered in the subtlest of shades. Listeners would be well-advised to find a tranquil moment in a dark room before settling down with a disc where the flow of air between quivering cello strings seems to be the only thing that keeps the title track, a pensive, beatless dirge reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, in motion.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com