New Buffalo, Australian songstress Sally Seltmann’s Arts & Crafts conception, opens her second release with a multi-vocal harmony in the vein of Eurythmics frontwoman Annie Lennox. Beyond the simple comparisons of light, punctuated vocal “bops, bums, and baas,” it is the melding of slap-delayed piano and large, sonic synth that allows us to enter her colloquial grouping of stories.

The album’s mantras all revolve around aspects of becoming and understanding general emotional concepts, and Ms. Seltmann often sounds like a solitary figure preaching to the mirror. Dreams and nostalgia purvey the tone and lyrical thematics of the record.

Like many of her Arts & Crafts label mates, Sally finds a short, pleasing melody, and sets into repetition as the compositions surrounding her vocals employ a piling technique, adding textual weight to the song without constricting the vocal simplicity.

Somewhere, Anywhere is a comfortable record, though the apparent sadness feels self-indulgent, bittersweet, and, ultimately, like it’s reveling in one’s personal emotion, regardless of triteness or simplicity. Her solemnity is betrayed by the specific brand of happiness she takes in her own imagination.

Closing with “Lobe Limbique,” named after the part of the brain responsible for emotional memory, a meditative swash of her family’s 100-year-old piano opens perhaps an ode to her personal muse for the record. The imaginative foundation of these songs is lynched in this emotional memory, or emotional wondering, or simply the attempt to feel what one has not had the opportunity to feel — to use imaginative empathy to carry the musical development.

An excerpt, “…this is a song about singing, about being, about feeling,” is also the song about making, about wanting to feel, and wanting to share.

-Ryan McCarthy

New Buffalo: www.newbuffalo.net
Arts & Crafts: www.arts-crafts.ca