t’s been three years since Arto Lindsay finished his incomparably subtle and sexy Prize . Something in the album’s accompanying artwork embodied its spirit perfectly, a jumble of defiant sterility and rippling eroticism – suggestive pile-ups of bulbous plastic and glass, an empty limousine wrapped in blue light and shrink-wrap, things artificial and alienating lingering on impossibly sensual curves. Lindsay’s seamless song-suite followed in kind – a voluptuous spread of supple Tropicalia rhythms, bubbling beats, and Lindsay’s literati come-ons tangled in sharp-edged sheets of guitar skree and paranoid electronics. Lindsay navigated the splinters and spines of Prize with such grace and confidence that its danger was turned into irresistible allure. Each sharp corner bowed into a sinuous arc under the cool weight of Lindsay’s hushed pillow talk and languid rhythms; the terrain was uncertain, yet Lindsay’s inner lover emerged unscathed.


On Invoke , however, the fears which Lindsay shook off with uncanny poise finally seem to be catching up with him. As before, there are clues buried in the artwork. Invoke comes wrapped in thick, stark lines filmed as close-up and edgy as focus allows. They are Prize’s curvaceous surfaces flattened into bold stretches of light and dark more concerned with declaration than intimation. The inner sleeve reproduces a placard used by striking Memphis sanitation workers led by Martin Luther King; in text more akin to a shout than a statement it announces, “I AM A MAN” – all capital letters, black and white, naked and definite. And so it seems that the seamless melding of influence that marked Prize should separate into the clear, explicit dichotomy of tension and relief on Invoke . Here, Lindsay appears to leave his razor’s edge exposed and the pillows are out to soothe rather than seduce. Lindsay’s lover-man cool has been stricken with traces desperation and doubt, his breathy invitations replaced by successions of prickly whispers and sighing laments, shrouded in hints of discord and distance. While sensuality once overcame unease, now it appears only to gloss over a hidden pulse of anxiety.


The rattled Arto Lindsay on Invoke may be a changed man, but his methods remain largely the same. Invoke , therefore, finds Lindsay at his strongest when he straddles those black and white lines, teetering between his Brazilian inclinations and his electronic embellishments, between the emotional poles of fear and poise. Album standout “You Decide,” for example, hitches a slithery skitter of programmed drums to a sensual Tropicalia bass bump while ripples of acoustic guitar flutter like jungle butterflies in a forest of bristly synth whistles. Lindsay croons calm and deliciously dry, yet his cool against this lithe and danceable backdrop stands in direct contrast to his spoken anxiety: “Want to hide, want to hide / Need to scream to confide” . Here the relationship between Lindsay’s confidence and anxiety is as striking as before, only these days Lindsay prefers a stark overlap of said emotions over the blurring of their image. Elsewhere, the cracks in Lindsay’s cool exterior make themselves more explicit, both sonically and lyrically. His tone on the album opener “Illuminated” is fragile and tentative, as if sung by fading candlelight with the curtains drawn against the daylight. Yet Lindsay’s melancholy depiction of his life “devoted to a telling detail... awash in overall impressions” runs along sexy swirls of elastic hip-hop beats and winding synths accentuated by clipped guitar flourishes. The albums title track grows even more desperate and yet more serene, replacing the electronic beats and synth of “Illuminated” with cyclical, popping drums and sighing Brazil-inflected strings, while Lindsay utters sensuously mournful invocations for “the flimsy underpinnings of temporary things.” Yet for their many neuroses – both hidden and overt – these tracks never stray directly into the realm of despair, a tribute to the inherent grace and poise Lindsay exhibits in his most musically confident moments. Like the best of Lindsay’s music, they are celebrations of an “in-between” state, both musically and emotionally, in which the boundaries of genre and sentiment fold into a curiously relaxed union of subtle, interlocking curves.


The path becomes considerably more confused, however, when Lindsay strays into the clear delineations alluded to in the album’s jaggedly bipolar cover art. A master of stylistic melds within a single tune, Lindsay lapses into unevenness and distraction when he opts to divide more traditionally aggressive or traditional fare on a song-by-song basis. “Predigo,” for example, snaps with well-harnessed violence beneath a tumble of guitar squall and unhinged Brazilian drum breaks as Lindsay’s heavily processed vocals lash out with righteous indignation. Yet its emotional counterpart, “Clemency,” lurches uncomfortably in similar territory – the tangled loops never quite coalesce, the breakdowns wander awkwardly, and Lindsay’s half-whispered bark sounds uncommonly ill at ease on such unsteady ground. Similarly, the quasi-improvised soundscaping on “In The City That Reads,” led by Lindsay’s guitar squelches and a host of computer cutups, proves satisfying and frustrating in equal measure. A similar trend muddles many of the “relief” numbers that now deliberately offset the heavier fare. A standout such as “Over/Run” shimmers beneath stutter beats and interlocking vocals (particularly at its gorgeous conclusion), but the remainders of the gentler tracks opt for a considerably tamer approach. Both “Delegada” and “Ultra Privileged” offer pleasant-if-slightly-fluffy diversion, the former benefiting from the inclusion of swooning clarinet and the latter from Lindsay’s impeccably tender delivery, but a smart-alecky take on Martin and Rossi’s classic “Beija-Me” suffers for its fusion-lite funk breakdown. Sadly, it’s the album’s final track, souring the conclusion of Invoke with a reminder of its most awkward points instead of its many shining delicacies – of which there is certainly no shortage.


Despite his newfound jitters, Arto Lindsay remains a consummate songwriter and interpreter whose poise and poignancy still far exceeds his inconsistencies. The slinky synthesis of Prize may have yielded to the sharp edges of nerves and the lines may have grown bolder and darker, but Lindsay’s ever-resilient cool and sharp ears fill maintain the strength of even the weaker songs. And though Invoke may lack its predecessor’s feeling of integration, it remains bound by ties of Lindsay’s uniquely alluring vision – his absolute confidence in even his most disparate musical tangents. Perhaps it most telling, then, that closer inspection of the solid black blocks of close-up text sprawled across Invoke’s front cover reveals flecks of light-colored paint and cracks of white peeking through. So it goes with Lindsay’s latest collection of songs – more clear, more definite, yet the traces of the sublime combination from which his music draws its allure still brighten his darker patches.