by Ari Roth
Arto Lindsay is one of the great 20th century musical omnivores, and his five decade career spans ferocious, pioneering no wave noise-punk with DNA, spiky postmodern jazz with the Lounge Lizards, and angular new wave with Ambitious Lovers. Solo, however, he spent the 1990s crafting oblique, bossa nova-influenced pop records that largely abandoned the edgy, downtown cool of his previous work. Some of these albums garned acclaimed at the time, but the fact that the majority of them are now out of print is telling: on the surface, they very much sound like a product of their time, and their languid, leisurely pace is not necessarily as conducive to revivalism as some of his more extreme works.
In fact, rather than being outliers, these “pop” records are part of what places him in a rich lineage of New York underground music. He is dedicated to exploration and experimentation informed by a love of both the outer reaches of noise and an abiding passion for melody and pop music, and a belief that the two can and should coexist within the same body of work. In this way, he is a kindred spirit with artists like Arthur Russell and Animal Collective, the latter of whom he even collaborated with in 2002.
Lindsay’s trademark “skronk” guitar, characterized by the dissonant, distorted shards that he first wrenched from his instrument as a member of DNA, is mostly absent on Noon Chill, although it would reappear in subsequent live performances of the songs. Instead, the music here is controlled and subtle, with his relaxed tenor flitting playfully over rolling instrumental tracks. One of the most striking things about these songs is that they are rarely characterized by simple and unambiguous emotional qualities. Although the instrumentals range from stormy and roiling to smooth and gentle, Lindsay approaches each track with the same opaque, zen-like calm, playing idly with language and spinning out strands of wandering melody while never entirely showing his hand. Often, he seems to choose words more for their sonic qualities than for their meaning, such as on “Whirlwind,” with its puzzling koan of a refrain, “how round is down?”
Elsewhere, Lindsay is more direct, but no less impenetrable. “Simply Are” is the record’s most immediate pop song, an earworming, infectious slice of bossa nova – Lindsay grew up in Brazil – that allows him to stretch out with some of his best lyrics. The words are often clever and beautiful – “daydream your way around the room,” “you are one of those creatures who simply are” – but there is still an undercurrent of almost disconcerting, ambiguous detachment, as the song opens with Lindsay addressing the object of his affection: “I do love your lack of all expression / I find it not at all distressing.”
The rest of the album sees Lindsay experimenting with late-90s electronic styles such as trip hop and drum & bass on songs like “Blue Eye Shadow,” “Ridiculously Deep” and “Anything,” accompanied by sensitive session musicians capable of complex and nuanced interplay with the organic electronic rhythms. Throughout these stylistic variations, Lindsay remains the unchanging center, unphased by the universe and reflecting, with elliptical humor and wit, on the strange unknowability of life’s little moments.
