Beyoncé's two sides: The fierce, the banal

Album titles are so limiting. But . . . ellipses are a girl's best friend.

So, taking a page out of Philadelphia singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata's 2008 disc, Elephants . . . Teeth Sinking Into Heart, Beyoncé expresses her dot-dot-dot duality with her new two-disc set I Am . . . Sasha Fierce (Columbia ***), on sale today.

The double-sided sobriquet is a pretension, but it turns out to be a useful one. That's because the album, which is being sold in both an 11-song "standard edition" and a 16-song "deluxe edition," is cleanly broken into two thematically and musically distinct parts, and one is clearly superior to the other.

The first part, I Am, whose leadoff single is the mildly gender-bending "If I Were a Boy," represents the multitalented Ms. Knowles - she declines to use her last name when in music mode - as she is "underneath all the makeup, underneath the lights, and underneath all the exciting star drama."

The second part, Sasha Fierce, is named after the alter ego of Beyoncé, who stars as Etta James, alongside Adrien Brody and Jeffrey Wright, in Cadillac Records, Hollywood's version of the Chess Records story, which opens Dec. 5.

Sasha's first single is the seriously percolating banger "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," which was the grist for a Saturday Night Live skit this weekend with Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and Paul Rudd.

The persona is a window into "the more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken side and more glamorous side that comes out when I'm working and when I'm on the stage," the singer says on her MySpace page, where I Am . . . Sasha Fierce has been streaming since last week.

The two-sides-of-Beyoncé idea is, as she puts it, "to really step outside of myself, or shall I say, step more into myself, and reveal a side of me that only people who know me see."

It also, conveniently, allows her to work two sides of the commercial fence. I Am songs like "Disappear" and "Ave Maria" (a rewrite of the aria) are her chance to go for a Streisand- and Celine Dion-size middle-of-the-road audience. The soaring romances and weepers decorated with piano and strings eschew electro-beats. Their touchy-feely lyrics are cowritten by hired hands such as songwriter Amanda Ghost, who also co-wrote James Blunt's "You're Beautiful."

To Beyoncé's credit, the songs are uniformly well sung. At 27, the newly married megastar wife of rapper-mogul Jay-Z seems to have outgrown the need for excessively showy vocalizing, and she almost invariably avoids the rococo ululating that marked her earlier, Mariah Carey-influenced efforts.

But all the restraint in the world can't make up for the bland and banal nature of the purportedly personal songs on I Am, which, if they truly represent the "real" Beyoncé, suggest that she may not be worth getting to know after all.

Sasha, on the other hand, seems as if she'd be a blast to hang with. Like I Am, the album's flip side plays with gender roles. Whereas the softer disc proffers the wishy-washy "If I Were a Boy," the fiercer flip side serves up "Diva," a modal burst of feminist funk that nods to Lil Wayne's hypnotic summer hit "A Milli," and insists that "a diva is a female version of a hustla."

Sasha Fierce keeps close to the street, with a pretty much nonstop supply of machine-driven grooves that puts the evening gown in the closet and gets to business on the dance floor. The grooves are repetitive, the tempo is upbeat, the envelope is pushed on techno flirtations like "Video Phone," and even would-be ballads like "Hello" reach out with forward-pushing momentum.

"I think I'm in love with my radio," Beyoncé sings on "Radio," a hooky grabber that will often be heard on its titular medium. " 'Cause it never lets me down."

On the disappointing I Am (**1/2) those words no longer seem to apply to their auteur's music. But when Sasha (***1/2) enters the picture, her fans get their Beyoncé back.