Consumer Guide Album

Arto Lindsay: O Corpo Sutil/The Subtle Body [Bar/None, 1996]
For over a decade, while Lindsay promoted samba's whispery vocals and fancy-pants chords as makeout music for sensual intellectuals, many who by some mischance lacked Portugese continued to find those very selling points precious, schlocky, or both. So now Arto flexes his connections and writes his own jazzboistic verse, and, well, there's nothing like a lyric you can understand. After leading with something about the colors of the sky that's way too sensitive for this reporter, the man sounds like the bedroom astronaut he says he is even when he's celebrating a superbright two-year-old on the most seductive song here--even when he reverts to Portugese. Reason to regret one's unimaginative personal relationship with Caetano Veloso. A−