It’s 1988 and the concept: no wave mainstay Arto Lindsay Does Pop - and not just catchy tunes, mind you, but SHITTY PAUL ABDUL/GEORGE MICHAEL POP. With skronk! And bossa nova! In Portuguese! The results? Well, pretty remarkable, really.

Personally, I remember buying this record in the throes of Arto-dom ca. 1991 or so, buying every pricey DNA, Lounge Lizards and Golden Palominos release I could get my hands on just so long as it featured Lindsay’s yelping and skronking. But the idea of the Ambitious Lovers was his most, well, ambitious yet. Still, within a few bars, I was already pressed to consider whether I could ever endorse the record, the “Straight up now tell me are you gonna love me for-ev-ah/Oh-Oh-Oh!” factor being so very, very high. So I did what all good critics do with music they don’t understand: I put it away for the better part of the next decade.

But upon pulling it out again, well, I’m struck somewhat differently by what was the group’s second release. Certainly, it’s still not an easy marriage; there remain moments that remind me why I pretty much didn’t turn on the radio for about two years. Yet 15 years on from Forever Your Girl is altogether different than 24 months. Now, I can see that the record’s greatest success lies not despite the “Straight Up” factor in songs like “Love Overlap” but rather because of it. At the moment, I’m hard-pressed to find any other artist outside the genre who unironically embraced the world of late 80s R&B — to the “serious” student of music, the era remains every bit as alien and exotic as, say, the Drummers of Burundi or the oud were to most of the listeners who came upon Jon Hassell at the dawn of the 80s.

And at this point in history, let’s face it: this genre-splice remains a hell of a lot more interesting (not to mention challenging). Here, Arto croons, yells and raps like Byrne could never quite manage, while instrumentalist Peter Scherer makes like the German LA Reid, programming drum beats only Laker Girls could love, brash bass sequences and arabesque string synths to great, unabashedly POP melodies. And just as you start to think you can’t stand it anymore, on comes on Brazilian tracks like “Caso” or “It Only Has To Happen Once”, where you forget where you are and how you got there and just get…lost.

A few of these tracks would reportedly show up in the (rather sorry) film version of Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. Thereafter, Lindsay and Scherer would do one more AL record together (1991’s Lust), but by then things were different — Paula was on her way to coming out as an anorexic before proving Fitzgerald wrong once again on American Idol. Lindsay, well, he does that Brazilian thing a lot more these days while still beating on his fire engine red Danelectro 12-string for fun now and again (who knows what became of Scherer). But somewhere out there, there remains this unique tension, unresolved and waiting for rediscovery. Hmmmm…