With each album, Alicia Keys becomes more of an oddball and peeks back a little further in time. Her new record glances toward the ’60s, but she’s not just retro-soul anymore.

Keys isn’t an incisive lyricist. She sings generalities, which at worst can make her a platitude-monger, but at best can lift her toward classic pop writing. Here she switches between lovers’ plaints and inspirational self-help, elevating both by the grainy intensity of her voice. She also has subtleties; “Go Ahead,” a kiss-off set to squelchy Stevie Wonder funk, doubles as commentary on the Bush years: “What have you given me, but lies lies?”

Only 27, she has learned classic soul: “Teenage Love Affair” has the gleam of Motown, and “Where Do We Go From Here,” built on an obscure Memphis-soul sample, turns into a vintage cry from the heart.

Her first two albums showed how well she could renovate an old structure. As I Am advances by showing an experimental side. The daring single “No One” may have the least swinging beat of any 2007 hit: a midtempo bass drum under unsyncopated classical piano. Dullsville, but Keys piles on other parts — a tuba-like synthesizer, a tearfully-determined vocal — until it marches toward obsession. And “I Need You” could have been a hymnlike ballad but instead rides atop sputtering drums and percolating keyboards. So what if she’s only singing, “East needs West and No needs Yes”? The music is dizzying, even mesmerizing.

Download: “I Need You,” “The Thing About Love,” “No One”