At 13, a girl is growing and changing. Her once perfectly pink bedroom clashes with new tubes of bright red lipstick. Her once beloved stuffed toys and unicorn figurines fight for a place amongst scented candles and binders scribbled over with boys’ names. If life were a movie complete with soundtrack, New Buffalo’s The Last Beautiful Day would play as the shot pans from training bra to Angelina Ballerina books on the shelf.
“It’s gentle, not quite rock ‘n’roll,” says Sally Seltmann, the Australian chanteuse known as New Buffalo. “But it has the feeling and emotions associated with it.”
The Last Beautiful Day is more than just an album of ethereal beauty. The project acts as a concentration of Seltmann’s inspirations, the culmination of her musical youth.
“I started out with an idea,” she admits. “The old Hollywood feel, black and white musicals, washed out strings.”
The Last Beautiful Day is Seltmann’s musical equivalent to a cotillion–but she won’t appear in a white tulle dress, rather with a guitar, a keyboard and an iPod. After releasing a beautiful and innocent EP in her homeland, she’s dropped her first full length, to wondrous applause at home and abroad. Prior to the album’s August release you would have scraped up only curious looks at the words “New Buffalo,” but now, after a North American release on Arts & Crafts, the indie kids are buzzing.
The album has garnered Seltmann more than just recognition from a larger audience, but independence as well. After her marriage to Darren Seltmann of the Avalanches, having the experienced sound maker on board to help out seemed natural. A few years later the marriage has lasted but the partnership in the studio took a break.
“We worked on the EP together, but I wanted to engineer my own sound on this album,” explains Seltmann. “The way I produced it was to be really romantic. The album is like a play you’d see in an old broken theatre, a real amateur production. I wanted to capture the beauty and innocence of the mistakes.”
Capture this beauty she has, but Beautiful Day’s songs of heartbreak and wanton desire also manage to fondly elaborate on the awkwardness of it all. On her debut, Seltmann sees with unsullied eyes not the embarrassment of tripping over untied shoelaces but the complex and mysterious way one falls to the ground.
As a songwriter, Seltmann possesses a sentimentally investigative eye, evident in her lyrical style. Maybe there’s something in the water, maybe it’s her Australian blood, but a perceptiveness like hers is rare and innate.
“I want to do music that naturally comes out,” she says. “In a few years time I’ll look back and say ‘yeah, I was actually like that.’”
It’s always sad to see a little girl grow up. One day she’s prancing around the house dressed as a fairy, the next she’s making out with a boy in the family room while her parents are grocery shopping. Perhaps The Last Beautiful Day isn’t an album for these misbehaving moments, but it’s perfect for remembering them after the little girl has grown up.