Arto Lindsay: Prize

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More About

• Arto Lindsay
• Luther Vandross
• John Donne
• Soul Music
• Sexuality

Arto Lindsay
Prize
Righteous Babe

ARTO LINDSAY'S ABILITY to conflate and confuse categories lesser mortals consider opposites--animal passion and contemplative cunning, "natural" samba and "artificial" electronics--shows no signs of lagging on Prize. But his sensual, bilingual murmur has become a mixed blessing you'd sooner associate with Luther Vandross than a No Wave guitarist: He has the seeming potential to shut his lover's eyelids in midcoital bliss by dreaming a future of infinite yet ever subtler orgasms. But unless you're a compulsive musical bed-hopper who finds only the unfamiliar erotic, a sexy--if predictable--pop like this will do just fine at sundown.

Having blown his snazziest conceptual moves (retooling Al Green and Prince songs on 1996's definitive Mundo Civilizado), here Lindsay's less broad strokes--drum 'n' bass eruptions, sax glides--please you without seeming to try. Most important, his singing has slipped another notch below his previous punk hysteria, its grain all but stripped of gawk. I've even come to prefer his sonorous Portuguese to his brainy attempts to show himself as the John Donne of the Lower East Side.