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.