Sally Seltmann Hey Daydreamer. There were the Moles, Even As We Speak and the Lucksmiths. That was the extent of it, the roster of Australian music that wasn't wretched. Truly. Oh but you laugh in my face what about the Go Betweens? I laugh back in your face with cheese whiz on my breath. The Go Betweens rank with Felt and East Village as the most over lauded, under heard bands and yet somehow, incredulously, over-appreciated bands ever. I realize this is an unpopular opinion. But such is the beauty of life, the right for me to think that 16 Lovers Lane is mostly pish and for you to think I am insane. Sally Seltmann is Australian and she's brilliant. By the way. This is the artsy fourth album. There is also Allo Darlin and when they were mostly just Australian, you know back when they were mostly a solo thing, they were amazing and while they are still pretty great they have started writing songs about the Go Betweens and when pressed to pick a favorite Go Between, though the most sensible choice of Lindy was not offered, head AD "Elizabeth" defers. First track is artfully arranged title track, bassoons?, trills, her multi-tracked voice, some sorts of woodwinds, samples and it is all mixed into a delicate thrill ride, a high speed chase in a radio flyer. It is packed with nostalgia, sepia tinged sentiments, dreams teased into existence and charm. Is it all charm? But what of Summershine records you say? Ok, the Rainyard were almost there but have you head the Earthmen? But then Sally is a far way removed from indie. She's a bit of a big deal in Australia I suppose. She's in a band with two others more popular than her but she's the genius right? Second track Billy more of the haunted daydream feeling. Her husband is producer. He's in the Avalanches. Yes, the Avalanches are horrible. Paleness with a muscle shirt, beating your heart senseless until you feel worthless and alone. But everyone else loves the Avalanches. I know. Sally in untarnished by association. His name is Darren. There are a fair number of Australians named Darren I feel. This track is titled Billy and there are bells and softly patted drums and a distance that didn't exist on the last record. On her last record Sally was possibly the most honest purveyor of confessional pop music I had ever heard. It was a record cleanses of pathos, bathos, bathetic it was not, pathological only in the sense of its soul laid bare feel. It was a comment on her life as she was living it. It was made poetic almost by accident. This is decidedly more pristine. These are characters that exist only on the periphery, at least through the first three tracks. Do I miss Sally as narrator? I do. But this is wonderful, all the same. It is a gorgeously produced record. Now to the psychdelia. Is she a fan of Richard Davies? It has his common track of a repeating motif on the piano as background and more dexterous maneuvers saved for voices and strings and charisma. Needle in the Hay. Were I a real record reviewer I would be listening to the lyrics and offering interpretations to you at no extra charge, I'd delve deep into the mind of Sally and discover the source of the delay for the next Avalanches record hidden somewhere in between the lines that obviously refer to strife in the Seltmann marriage. But I am not a real record reviewer. I remind of this in order to excuse my incoherence. Next track, Dear Mr Heartless, her voice recorded in a separate frame of mind than the music. The words forlorn the delivery optimistic, the music a giddy jaunt. Confidence has turned her heart to the greater world at large. This could be about an important person in her life or it could be a rebuke to a fake record reviewer such as myself. Would I be offended at being classified as a "guilty sunset"? Hardly. Martial drumbeat, muted horns, the general buzz of being self assured in a recording study and now harpsichord and bass notes played slow. We are soon to execute a move we have considered not too closely and so we will feel a sense of true dislocation soon as we wither live in the basement of occupied territory or we move into a an apartment we hope doesn't contaminate the spirit of life to such an extent that we voluntarily leap from third floor windows into the beds of el caminos carrying pigeon feathers and foam rubber baby prosthetics. Our soon is not chubby. Is this wrong? I am a bit astry with my thoughts because the tone of I Will Not Wear Your Wedding Ring is a bit comically sinister. Is it meant to be sinister? It's like Heavenly opening for Huggy Bear, we are all feminists but hygiene is not a universal right as recognized by the international. There's drama, it makes me smile or it makes me giggle and I suppose that wasn't the point. Lovely mind. Right Back Where I started From. Here could be the continuation point from the emotions that held point on the last record, harps, and electric whistles and her shyness on display. Now the piano rises up and her voice abundantly proud and wordless. It is building to some sort of crescendo. Are crescendos cheap ploys then? It was a lovely thing, this track, and now it's reached a higher level of emptiness, it is louder sure but when the drop comes the intensity returns. Is it the perception of the lack of distance between Sally and her listener that beguiles? She is not a star and do we love her more for her commonness? Catch of the Day, shouty bits about fish and self determination. The last record did have a scent of self help manual about it but not in any overbearing sense. When Sally sang about flowering apart from her loved ones it seemed more an acquiescence to life as a pop singer in the Antipodes. Synthesizers join the fray and a return to the harmonic chanting, all she needs is a didgeridoo and a Peter Garrett cameo. Not my favorite but not horrible. Not East Village horrible. YOu know Paul Kelly has redeemed himself quite nicely in Birdie. And he is a handsome man. I am in desperate need of a haircut but I am feeling a bit melancholic and I am enjoying it for a moment. I am happy always these days, I am with my soul mate, the person that I can be most myself with and the person I believe is most true to themselves with me and we have an amazing son that I am singing both sides of Louder Than Bombs too but there were those moments growing up when you felt pleasantly melancholic, alone, always, and without prospects and there with you, to guide you along, were your friends, on cassette. Sally must have had many of the same friends and she sounds eminently happy but perhaps she should spend a few more moments with old friends and reflect on the sunny side of being alone. But then Holly Drive arrives with its galloping rhythm and my heart turns yellow again, the life force of love and happiness carrying me through another day of feeling inadequate and sure that some day I will be discovered as a fraud. I have a wonderful family, a wonderful lie and Sally has written a song about it with steel guitar and cherry blossom scent spread across the grooves. Perhaps it was the perception of men from Australia as being comically male that has infected our enjoyment of pop songs that originate from there. Is Australia the Canada of the Southern Hemisphere while New Zealand is the Scotland? Possibly. But New Zealanders reminded me much more of Canadians than Australians did. Australians have a higher sense of self regard than the new globally dominant super power in soccer, the USA. So when Peter Garrett comes off all wet and socially aware it is a bit ridiculous. Last track. Beautiful. Confessional. A love song for her lover. Her lover could be an Avalanche, a Gray Whale, or this song itself. There is hope in the goodness and charm of people whose soul radiates joy such as this.

Moto Boy Keep Your Darkness Secret.  Do you google Moto Boy?  Do google him.  You will discover that he looks every inch the pop star.  He is chiseled softly from talc with floppy fringe featured, the cheekbones, the 'I look as if I just stepped out of a Mael party' look.  What is not to love?  Royston, Purina, Ablixa, Apropos, Nausea,  Moto Boy is Oskar genius.  Why then...whatever.  This is the third record.  The Berlin record.  Does it sound German only because I am aware that it was recorded in Berlin or because Berlin has a distinctive effect on pop stars that record there.  Achtung Baby and the Berlin trilogy?  I don't know.  Did the Strokes embody the sound of New York or did their sound embody the implied sound of New York?  Who can be certain.  Lou Reed's Berlin should sound like Michael Bloomberg then.  Are there blind taste tests in the mall where you sit peacefully with a Rand McNally and for you are played varieties of unknown music and you are endeavored to select the origin city?  I would imagine not.  And if Berlin is so influential upon the sound of pop music why then is nearly all of the domain set of German pop music, including that fortuitously recorded in Berlin, uniformly dread inducing?  First track Midnight Rain, it's a bit more smoldering than he has been in the past, fuller, fleshed out and it is gorgeous.  I don't suppose it is German now. I have a niece now in Berlin, born in Berlin this week.  Oh Berlin, you will have absconded with my American niece.   My wife's lineage is Swedish and I am in line for the 53rd earldom of the Scottish/French Canadian dominion and so we are rooting for the Scottish to come out in our own son, with heavy sighs we dream that the New Zealand of the northern hemisphere influences him the same as Berlin has affected this record.  When listening to this album for the first time I was waiting in line at a restaurant and in front of me were some clean, fit, drab young teenagers,  They all had the same fashion sense, they each wore a ball cap and I had this crushing sense of fear that my son would soon join their pack.  He would become anonymous, the middle member of the middle sized, middle ranked group on the popularity scale at middle brow American High School.  It can be comforting to be anonymous in a pack.  But I also stood just outside the group.  Even as I reveled in my ordinary stature.  I imagine Moto Boy was spit on by the anonymous members of the middling utopia.  I've railed against the worship of mediocrity in our world today.  From the President to Quentin Tarantino to cronuts to Sydney Crosby it is an epidemic.  the fear of standing apart.  Second track Keep Your Darkness Secret and variety is not important in Berlin apparently.  Each of the songs here follow a similar pattern save for the jaunty one near the end.  Cheekbones sucked in, muscles unflexed and his tender croon on full display as a sometimes plodding rhythm drives the songs into an ethereal world of loves lost, fought over and knives drawn and bloodied.  I imagine him as a dramatic sort, every drag on a cigarette a Vonnegut novelette.  It is him. He is the star of the record, not his playing which is sublime or the production which is the same, but the melancholy that he has absorbed through his skin and slowly excises over the breathy exhalations here. Next track, Someday a bit like the last one but the quality control is so exceedingly excellent it seems a brilliant compendium instead of redundancy.  I am in search of a new home these days.  It is some few weeks since I had started this entry, my son is long and lean now.    I am having pangs of the usual longing for relevance in his life, the need to finish the novel I finished a few years ago and have decided needs to be rewritten.  I could reimagine it, Moto Boy as lead character, in a nursing home crooning his heartbreak to the closed head injury patients on ward while the LPN's swoon and secretly wish they did not know that he was in love with Morris the man who lost his mind on an operating table, 2 lbs into a paint pail and a quarter million dollars per year in therapy to achieve the look of tall fescue in his eyes that are less a window into a soul than a desperate plea for absolution.  This is Love.  My wife's favorite.  Se has taken to singing this to our child.  I am more partial to the Smiths because those words inhabit the nearest reaches of my own mental universe.  I can sing most Smiths songs on recall and I wonder the effect of my singing, out of key, Asleep to my agitated 10 week old will be.  Will he take a turn as Christabell LaMotte or perhaps take a turn more sociopathic.  So often fears have swords drawn to combat the brilliance of dreams.  Smeared guitar near the end, as an outro of excess to cover up the doubt that is elegantly expressed within the lyrics.  I am writing in between sighs, in one ear attempting to decipher the meaning of life as conveyed by a Moto Boy pop song and in the other attempting to unravel the cipher of my son's panoply of cries, grunts and coos.  Fifth track has begin, the trip-hop inspired beat has fallen away in favor of  gentler motif of synthesized tones and piano tinkles.  There is a cross pollination of aspirations at work, the goal of embracing music by connecting with a universe spanning, harmony of the spheres influenced collective consciousness my mind entangled with the notes as they drift across the expanse and more locally the desire to not miss my son's first left eyebrow raise.  This is the perfect soundtrack for all of it.  Heaven In a Heartbeat Come  More softly chiming notes from a piano, the drift of the city ambience pressed into the grooves, his voice, expressive and revealing.  If it is not Berlin it feels then like alienation, a strange land where you pour your heart into the night and the echoes are untranslatable,    Europe is not so homogenous as the social engineers would protest. Sweden is probably more like Berlin than Sweden is similar to London but the words are in English and the heart is a Scandinavian blend of wan and desperation.  Now to the post rock dance single.  Minimal architecture, very late 1970s/early 1980s dreamscape with a Casio preset rhythm, a ringing guitar riff, and a When in Rome sense of drama.  It all seems so very serious.  He played guitar in the Cardigans before finishing this album and their sense of alarm at people considering them bubblegum fluff may have over spilled into the water cooler and fostered a sense of paranoia, or Moto Boy is generally forlorn.  Stereotypes.  "We were too young to love..." and in a just world this would be the soundtrack to the last skate at Swedish roller rinks all over the kingdom.  It's insistent catchy and doesn't seem out of place even on an album of such funereal grace.    Next track back to the template established on the first few songs, slowness accompanying heartbreak and loneliness.  "Do you want me like I always wanted you?".  In the great history as it is written in several decades this will be the Berlin album but it is his Bob Wratten moment, his torment turned catholic, his emotional abyss spread forth for all to access, his misery made lovely and wonderful.  Synthesizers provide a greater amplitude for his heartache, and the swell of the music mimics the emotional tumult.  Second to last track, Nothing Shatters Like the Heart and it is a bit of a pastoral lament, the shimmering keyboards, his voice like a torch singer, female backing vocals, an optimistic performance art piece called despair.  Here is the cigarette lighters in the air, the indie sway, the squeeze your sweet thing's midriff ballad we were all hoping for.  The words, simple and pure, all artifice stripped away, direct and clear.  How does it translate into German?  I could ask my German niece when next I see her.  Epic climax, the keyboards in concert, his voice more urgent, a few baby's come to the fore, the moans o pleasure disguised as tearful moments of torment.  Buble' could cover this.  Marvelous.  Last track to a glorious record now, we are sad to see it come.  Just ten tracks.  The more familiar Moto Boy tone on the guitar, the Feed Me With a Kiss tone, the In a Room Without You tear soaked tenderness.  His voice soft, landscape changing, the emotion spare and penetrating.  He did not learn this from the Cardigans.  Cardigans bubblegum princess married someone from a dreadful band.  Said dreadful band once opened for My Bloody Valentine in Detroit and so she has reason for despair, a lifetime of listening to that, oh dear.  Or she could listen to Moto Boy, she could play this crescendo at full volume while trying to drown out the sounds coming from the home studio in their studio apartment in Williamsburg just above some indie actress having an orgasm to the new Mumford and Sons smash hit record.  Mote Boy the god king of the melancholic universe. 

today, there is this youtube person "thelazylazyme" and they post the most wonderful things.

Lanterns on the Lake Until the Colours Run. Second albums are key. The first Lanterns on the Lake was gorgeous sure but is the next version the same as the first with a few more monstrous licks they learned from playing the same 11 songs over and over, night in and night out in Nijmegen and the next in Heidelberg? Everyone has a "good" idea. The first Lanterns on the Lake album was an antique, or it was antiqued, it felt out of place, discovered, underexposed. They had ideals. Second record begins now with muscles rippling, tee shirts tight to the chest, band logos written in pen on spiral notebooks. Or on a nook. Does an antique have inherent value while new and modern lags? No. I have taken some time to warm to this album. I have needed sunday mornings curled in an uncomfortable chair with a special afghan and nutella and toes dipping into the cool morning air to learn to appreciate muscles. In music, muscles usually have negative connotation. In this city, this is true. We prefer the dainty, the delicate, snow filled globes and nostalgia rather than SUV's filled with the others. First track is a fitter Devics, it is very loud, except for her, the singer, music is still tender in her heart. Second track, a bit more nuanced, a bit more artistic, a bit more lovely. Now the chair where I came to my new conclusion has been moved to the basement and on the table next to it sits the Morrissey biography. My wife asked my mother to purchase it for me. I was delighted. It wasn't a set of golf clubs. I devoured. I read closely in haste. I was not inured. And today, I am heart broken. Devastated. Morrissey is small and petty, bitter, he is not worldly, not at all, in spite of the world having him in its embrace. It starts off vague and uninformative, he barely attempts to make pretty his mundane existence through a less than revealing concatenation of dour British television plots more poetic, he paints lovely portraits in inartistic prose of his favorite relatives and the image of his father the brawler is fascinating and when he speaks of his love for music I fall in love the same as he had, all over again. But his account of how the Smiths formed is almost vacuous. I was in a band, then I was not, oh and then I met Johnny Marr. Essentially. The Smiths were a love story but in his mitts its a discarded footnote. And the ponderous dissection of the Joyce affair, ugh. Is it about money? Was it only about how little Geoff Travis cared about the Smiths having a number one record? But Morrissey as Morrissey made the mundane poetic the way that Belle and Sebastian can not. Stuart Murdoch needs the fanciful and unreal. Perhaps because he did not have a Johnny Marr to fulfill his need for inspiration outside of the realm of imagination. Did Lanterns on the lake make this record hoping to make a mint? Perhaps not. I shall not taint them by association. But they trade in anonymity, assiduously cultivating it in their characterless montages. We, I, long for the intimate associations with our pop stars I think. We do. We want Paddy Mcaloon and, sadly, Morrissey. Or we want Stars, we long for their cleverness as homage in itself to Prefab Sprout and stories written by Torguil about Paddy. Love letters across an ocean. This, LOTL, is an open ended missive to the ocean of sound that is filled in with broad strokes. The delicate touches here are wonderful, but they are enveloped and smeared. These sexual coos, turned virginal do thrill, until the ocean swallows them, the sea swells rise and it is an impressive production but the moment of inspiration, the distillation of loneliness that propels their vision is lost and instead of the universal ache we achieve sympathy with their collective idleness, But it is individuals that make pop music most thrilling. A Bob Wratten line repeated ad infinitum turns catholic and we sing it in our inner voice and it is more beautiful than it has ever existed in the real world. This is the real world, with sparklers and twirling skirts and beautifl children with biblical names. I love it, don't mind my rambling. But when Morrissey existed in his pop songs only he was miraculous, he turned his mundane world into a shimmering escapade across the heads and crooked backs of those we knew didn't understand. We ate our burgers and wore our leather shoes, he would guess that this meant we did not get it, but he's wrong. Morrissey is dreadful. The Smiths as the Smiths exist only now. We can not isolate strains of genius from the whole, not any longer. Lanterns on the Lake exist only as a whole, the collective. They, allegedly, nearly split before making this album. It does not channel ferocity or anger, it's a gentleman's maelstrom on these first three tracks, and then the effects of the ubiquitous aether seeping into the grooves and pops and crackles are mostly implied but fervently. Would this music work with a personality? If the words were filled with meaning and desperate specifics and written with an agenda would it move the masses. I shared the Smiths agenda, I know I did, and I know that you did as well. I am uncertain about the agenda of Lanterns on the Lake. Green and Gold now. Pianos, Pianos. Her-whispering. I don't know any of the names. The names seem unimportant. This is gorgeous, it is the background soundtrack that plays when all of the best moments of your life occur to someone else. You live vicariously through the best moments of life because you can't remove yourself from the hope and comfort of conformity. This track is stunning, truly and this album is amazing and I love it but there is a higher ideal. I get it from the 1 minute trailer for the new Pains of Being Pure at Heart record, possibly only because I have angst and envy over his duffle coat and I am easily manipulated by the overexposed film of Kip Berman looking like a Dead Poets Society extra but it makes hairs flutter. His favorite romantic is surely Keats because even through Pains of Being Pure at Heart are affluent and have the disease of affluenza that has dampened the spirit of indiepop until it has reached near to its current state near demise and the idea of him writing a record where he really means it seems almost inspiring they still identify only with the purity of the struggle they are unfamiliar with. A small victory will win out and cheer us and yet...Green and Gold has finished and the soul is stimulated only esoterically, they haven't imprinted the feeling on my life's work. That sounds overly dramatic. My soul has impressions only of real life these days, reflections of unimaginable happiness and joy that lie less than a month away, of having a partner that fulfills all of my heart's desires and for whom I perform constantly so that she knows I am here. I am not inside of my own head. I am. But I am here in the world as well and willing and loud and unlike this song I am not the filler of her life. The drummer seems more important on this record than on the first record. Drummers having mothers, blah blah blah, it has all been said before. And the guitars are blurred into an unappealing tone of beige. Purity is normally white. The tumult that birthed this record has left a watermark. The sound comes first. Next track. Picture Show and there is the piano, the undistilled cacophony and her, whispering, they move her voice to a level just barely beyond discernible. Even when with sole piano accompaniment it's a bit too loud, the quiet made compensable by the masses. When they play the Broomfield Events center here this track will move the masses. Te entire state of Colorado will rise up and declare thir libertarian impulses freely and we will, with pitchforks, charge the hill and we will not be ashamed of gay marriage and weed for every one. And Lanterns on the Lake will sit on stage staring at their shoes. The heirs to Halstead have been exposed. Slowdive shall return. Piano and vinyl crackles. I mistook it for antiues and value once before now I understand it is manipulation of the loveliest sort. An experiment in the familiar until this track, ah, this track! Another Tale from Another English Town. Lying in bed one Sunday morning, while ti was much too cold to venture forth to my uncomfortable green recliner, I played this for my wife and it was astounding. The frisson between the notes and the air of a Colorado morning was remarkable, and we had hope, real hope. It remains. It isn't distinguishable from the rest of the record. But perhaps I long for their Englishness to be more prominent? We have given our son and anglophilic appendage, eh will love England as much as I love the England that existed in the Vistors Gold Mining in the Would Be Goods Marvellous Boy, here and of course in That Joke... and all of the other most important songs in the world ever that have existed forever in my heart where time is not fungible. The drama here is different, I was wrong, her voice commands instead of retreating and the force when combined is dazzling and the final few strums close the book on a beautiful chapter. The climax before a milder denoument. LAst track now, guitars and drums(how novel) and more of the beige we would have ben overjoyed with its exclusion. Her voice is pressed between pages but the pages are glossy and too thin and so it is all bleeding together and I can't quite make out the words and so my heart...the spectator...sigh. And the drums go on.