Joi Cardwell.

There are so many divas these days that the term has lost its meaning. A diva cannot be manufactured: No amount of wigs and screams can compensate for a timid, untrained voice or shallow renderings of cornball material. Sure, a diva must have attitude (another overused word), but, more important, she must possess a spiritual presence that can lead listeners into the realm of something larger than her boudoir or even her walk-in wardrobe.

Joi Cardwell doesn't have the biggest, most belting voice. Hers is more subtle, more ethereal and seductive. She doesn't have big-label bucks behind her: She's too creative to be compromised in the ways that the music biz demands of its mainstream dance acts. Neither glamour queen nor earth mama, Cardwell focuses on her music, which she writes and often produces herself. Like her peers Kristine W and Billie Ray Martin, this upstart who got her start singing with house-music innovator Lil Louis ("Club Lonely," "Saved My Life") possesses the kind of depth that demands control over her art.

Along with her other distinctions, Cardwell is an anomaly to dance music in another way: She's a lesbian. And although sapphic sisters aren't unknown to club music (hi-NRG songbird Hazell Dean comes to mind), dance divas and queerness usually come together only in the time-tested tradition of straight women singers mouthing the sentiments and sexual desires of gay songwriter-producers Cardwell instead brings to the dance floor qualities associated with gals and their guitars--introspection, integrity, and authenticity. Like one of her songs says, Cardwell prefers to "keep it real."

On her sophomore solo album, Cardwell refines the rawness of her debut while maintaining its emotional honesty. Whereas her first album sometimes suffered from skeletal arrangements and static sonics, Joi Cardwell is much more lush and club-ready, the songs fully fleshed out, not crying out for further remixing. Without losing her focus on self-expression, Cardwell refines her songs with the help of America's finest house-music practitioners. Phillip Damien, Hani, Frankie Knuckles, Brinsley Evans, and Hex Hector all complement Cardwell's classy contemplations with aural settings worthy of her worldly-wise sophistication.

Although she can also raise the roof with gospel-influenced power-to-the-people anthems, Cardwell's defining approach is to sing meditative ballads set to extroverted, thump-intensive arrangements. The result is that she often sounds lonely in the crowd, musing softly as the band bumps on. The new songs are much more celebratory than before, and the best of them, "Found Love" (a collaboration with Knuckles and orchestrator Peter Schwartz), evokes the symphonic best of Diana Ross and Donna Summer. While putting us in touch with the joy of love's discovery, Cardwell reminds us that divas too can find lesbian love on the dance floor.