It has transformed R&B and soft rock, inspired a million delusional American Idol contestants, struck terror into the hearts of lesser divas and for all we know may even be the reason that a sickly-looking Whitney Houston was recently seen prostrating herself before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. “Jehovah, please bless me with an extra octave, that I might vanquish Mariah!”

But on Carey’s tenth studio album, something strange occurs: The Voice goes AWOL. After a much-publicized meltdown, a stint in rehab and a feature film debut more embarrassing than Britney Spears’s, Carey has reinvented her music. She’s curbed her showboating instincts, reined in her signature melisma and for the first time treated songs as something other than dragons to be slain. The result invites adjectives that in the past were unthinkable with her—restrained, relaxed, subtle—and sets the gold standard for diva records in 2005.

The mood is established right away, with the Jermaine Dupri–produced single “It’s Like That.” It’s a spare club bumper—the verses feature little more than a thudding bass-drum and the odd old-school ping—that opens up into a lilting chorus: “It’s my night/No stress/No fights/I’m leaving it all behind.” Here’s the part where the old Carey would have unleashed a terrifying, ululating, highly stressful series of vocal variations on the theme of stress-free living. But she lays back, content to croon, and the song glides enchantingly past.

The whole album is like that: You keep waiting for the ’90s MOR queen to rear her big-haired head, but she rarely does. “We Belong Together,” another Dupri track, begins with a little fake-out: some plaintive piano chords and a few bars of feathery warbling. But then a ticking beat kicks in, and Carey starts spilling out lyrics in the clipped, modern cadences of Beyoncé and R. Kelly. Carey even proves she can do breakneck with the best of them; on “One and Only” she actually outpaces guest rapper Twista, who is hip-hop’s land-speed king.

Carey has recorded several memorable collaborations with rappers over the years, but here she succumbs definitively to the power of dope beats. She’s hired production ringers (Kanye West, the Neptunes, underground comer Scram Jones) and hooked up with some of the world’s most dependable good-time MCs, including Snoop Dogg and Nelly, who trades singsong verses with her on the funky “To the Floor.”

And she’s gotten in touch with her inner thug. The woman who once jostled with Celine Dion for lite-radio supremacy coos to Snoop about how she wants to “fuck,” gripes about her “motherfucker” ex-boyfriend, and boasts about her “pimp penthouse with a sick-ass hot tub.”

But the real revelation is the ballads, which swerve surprisingly toward neo-soul. “Mine Again” and “I Wish You Knew” mix woodwinds, keyboards, wah-wah and breezy backing vocals into a sumptuous ’70s-style blend. You can’t help but suspect that Carey’s newfound moderation is due at least in part to an immersion in the music of that more humble age. Nothing like a steady diet of Marvin Gaye to set a gal straight.

Of course, Mimi is not utterly bombast-free. The album closes with “Fly Like a Bird,” a huge gospel song spiked with spoken-word samples of the preacher at Carey’s Brooklyn church. It’s clearly a personal song, and it builds and builds, climaxing with whooping shout-outs to Jesus, while Carey lets fly a series of vocal runs as flamboyant and unhinged as anything she’s ever put on record. She’d been saving it up all album long, and she’s earned the right to let rip.

DOWNLOAD:
“It’s Like That,” “Say Somethin’,” “Mine Again”