Put the rai on the rock.

Fuse the elegance of Fanco-lectronica and Bollywood’s Technicolor touches with the unctuousness of punk and the intrigue of chaabi instrumentation (featuring the mandolute, the oud, the bender), which is as foreign as it is familiar.

Add powerfully gruff voice that spits and simmers with righteous exhortations.

You get Rachid Taha, the provocative, Algerian-born genre-masher who gets better and chancier with age.

“And sexier,” says Taha, 46, from his home in France. “My voice is getting sexier every day.”

While efforts like the roughhewn Made in Median and the more delicate Ole Ole proved to be danceable mixed bags, his newest, Tekitoi, I sthe most focused. IT is a raw, passionate record that asks “who are you?” with the sort of heft that seems like a threat. It’s not.

“Tekitoi’s motivation was to show that, despite everything, we’re one and the same,” Taha says. “Communion – whether we like or don’t like!”

Certainly his sensuously wound cover of the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” finds Taha’s fervor in fullest bloom as he sings about lusty oil barons ad religious fanatics.

“It became a soldier’s anthem during the Gulf War, so I thought I’d bring it back in the present – I haven’t changed one word of the lyrics, except I sing them in Arabic, which has its own message.”

But Taha’s true indictments are saved for other moments. Such as “Safi,” a song addressed to all Arab states with no democracy or free expression.

“Those with power in those countries find it too sweet to let go,” he says. “I can’t really blame the West for that, although they migh tbe offering some of the candy.”

-A.D. Amorosi