Today through Friday, I’m counting down my 40 favorite albums of 2017. The usual caveat applies: I love all this music, but you should take my rankings with a grain of salt. And please bear in mind that I’m not trying to be definitive.
34. Arto Lindsay, Cuidado Madame (Northern Spy) Arto Lindsay has spent decades making art-pop that fuses koanlike poetry with the sophisticated Latin pop he grew up hearing while living in Brazil with his missionary parents. His first studio album in 13 years is filled with sensual polyrhythms that ripple and throb, and Lindsay’s singing voice continues to approach the rounded softness of jazz vocalist Bob Dorough. On the opener, “Grain by Grain,” erotically tinged wordplay falls playfully from his lips: “I love my handwriting,” he croons. “I love my hand writing your name / On your belly.” Most of the songs create a lovely tension by battering the hushed intimacy of the melodies and vocals with elegant, shimmying low-end grooves. Lindsay vividly digs into his masterful but primitive guitar technique on “Arto vs. Arto,” a bruising dialogue of weird vocal tics and brittle six-string dissonance, and on the ballad “Pele de Perto” he delivers unalloyed beauty. Cuidado Madame by Arto lindsay33. Raphael Roginski, Plays Henry Purcell (Bolt) Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski has a ravenous appetite for thoughtfully remaking unexpected repertoires in his idiosyncratic and fascinating style. He developed his unusual approach to the guitar not just through long practice but also via serendipitous misunderstanding: he started playing on an Uzbek kemencheh his Tatar grandmother had given him, and treated the spike fiddle like a guitar. His gripping improvisational style, bathed in melancholy, flows in fits and starts—its hiccups, noise bursts, and knotted tangles distinguish him from just about everyone else I’ve ever heard. In the past he’s brilliantly adapted klezmer, John Coltrane, surf guitar, Hasidic nigunim, J.S. Bach, and more. Now he sets his sights on the refined Baroque songs of British composer Henry Purcell, preserving their stately elegance but adding a scarred imperfection, as though he’s restoring blemishes that were sanded off the versions we know. On some songs Olga Myslowska delivers Purcell’s words with beautiful directness, and on others Sebastian Witkowski adds some unnecessary synth beds, but the best pieces feature Roginski’s resonant guitar all alone.
