Arto Lindsay - Cuidado Madame

Pitchfork 75

Arto Lindsay is the least known romantic to ever pick up a guitar, in part because he has never learned to play it. Since yowling his way through the seminal no wave outfit DNA, Lindsay has united his vocation and avocation: abstract noise and tropicália balladry. His career is a fascinating and often rewarding study in contradictions. As half of Ambitious Lovers for much of the 1980s, Lindsay didn’t sing so much as talk delicately, examining the structure of a song like a prowler testing a window over Peter Scherer’s keyboard blasts over several albums.

If his impatience registered as energy in search of a sound, then matters settled on his 1996 solo debut O Corpo Sutil: The Subtle Body. Like David Bowie and Everything But the Girl at the time, Lindsay fell in love hard with drum‘n’bass. On exquisite albums like Mundo Civilizado (home of one of the loveliest Al Green covers I’ve heard), the politest of percussive skitters collided against Lindsay’s guitar, which had lost none of its capacity to repel. By integrating clamor into lissome structures, Lindsay tested the possibility of violence in erotic play; his lyrics avoided smut but his guitar reveled in it.

For Cuidado Madame, his studio first album since 2004, Lindsay has changed not a bit: 11 songs, most less than four minutes long. While musicians his age are supposed to record back-to-basics albums, he’s still skronking up his balladry, still won’t leave his plaints well enough alone. A goddamn racket is his idea of a roots move. Take “Uncrossed,” on which Patrick Higgins’ acoustic plucks share headphone space with the pops and scratches of Paul Wilson and Kassa Overall’s programmed tumult. Mediating is Lindsay himself, armed with lines like, “Come unbridled here/Slide from grammar to glamour” sung in his tentative Winnie the Pooh coo. From Grammar to Glamour—how’s that for an Arto Lindsay memoir title?

Tuneful and sometimes absurd, Cuidado Madame honors its title: tangle with this 63-year-old with the proto-Harry Potter glasses and he’ll unleash poesy or, better, his guitar on you. “Grain by Grain,” its first and best track, is a whole erotic city whose commotion is unceasing. “I love my hand writing your name/On your belly,” Lindsay sings over atonal squeals and a glass-smooth synthesizer line. Song after song depicts lovers dividing and dissolving into each other yet the band’s approach is to sever them; the tension is frustrating and beautiful. Melvin Gibbs’ popping bass figures and Wilson’s staccato piano lines compete for attention in the aptly titled “Tangles,” while those in search of a more traditional Lindsay experience will find “Arto vs Arto” a delight—two minutes of six-string scratches over which Lindsay wheezes, grunts, and quite possibly hyperventilates.

Neither refinement nor fulfillment, Cuidado Madame serves as a refutation. Lindsay’s lyrics are spare and precise enough to work on the page—and that’s a rare compliment. But even if they were woolier, his band’s rabid imagination won’t let these songs congeal into boutique hotel background music. Treating genre as map rather than legend, Lindsay inhabits an ever-shifting space of modern cool that confuses appreciation with amalgamation. From Grammar to Glamour—he's more right than we thought.