While it's tempting to connect Sally Shapiro's reticent persona to her fragile, vanishing music-- supposedly she’s too shy to perform on stage or let producer Johan Agebjörn join her in the studio-- it's a red herring; some of music's most extroverted voices belong to reclusive singers, and her albums from Disco Romance on down are just as easily explained as the product of a ghost-girl persona as that of a Giorgio Moroder fan getting really into Tigermilk one night.
Somewhere Else isn't quite a departure from Sally Shapiro's last two albums, but in among the sequencers and identikit drums are instruments from a more muted palette: flute, saxophone, and beats that skitter rather than shimmer. The evolution was probably inevitable. The influence of Belle and Sebastian has long been palpable on Shapiro's work, and plying feathery vocals over disco is a gimmick that can't work forever; she and Agebjörn have often cited Italo divas Katy Gray and Valerie Dore as inspirations, but theirs is a genre is full of one-hit wonders. Gray, for instance, only had the one song. By Shapiro's second album, 2009's My Guilty Pleasure, people were calling Shapiro's formula samey; something had to give.
There's enough here that sounds of a piece with her last two records. The effervescent "All My Life" and "If it Doesn't Rain" soar like lost Disco Romance tracks, and the title of "This City's Local Italo Disco DJ Has a Crush on Me" certainly fits. Those songs were done solo-- much of Somewhere Else is farmed out to outside producers, another new development. They're either artists reprising their roles from Agebjörn's solo-ish album Casablanca Nights (which had enough Sally Shapiro tracks that it was basically Disco Romance 2.5), or pretty good outside bets, like the Drive soundtrack-boosted Electric Youth.
As on Casablanca Nights, the returns vary. Lead track "I Dream with an Angel Tonight" seems like Shapiro's normal fare-- boy meets girl, girl comes to love boy, boy was never meant for girl, who realizes this on the dancefloor-- until the track concludes in the musical equivalent of a sigh. At least the quiet-breakup track "Sundown" brings a foregrounded sax solo out of nowhere, which eventually comes to mimic Shapiro's voice, a neat trick. "What Can I Do", meanwhile, is your common or garden twee pop song. If you heard it in isolation, you'd never guess its singer once put out an album called Disco Romance.
Le Prix collaboration "Architectured Love" is fittingly titled, chilly and gorgeous as an ice palace. The New Wave-y "Don't Be Afraid" first appeared on French producer Anoraak's solo debut Wherever the Sun Sets, and has barely been changed here-- though it's charming enough that the cross-promotion can be forgiven. That's not the case with Electric Youth's "Starman", a passable-enough bit of hero worship that turns out not to have a hook. It's not terrible, just uninspired, and only goes to show that the disco romance formula is both harder to pull off and more singular than you'd think.
