When I heard New Buffalo was signed to Arts & Crafts, I sharpened my repertoire of trusty Canadian jokes, drooling at the opportunity to once again tackle the Great Indie Wilderness Up North with my razor wit. But alas, it was all for naught, as it turns out New Buffalo hails from another British Commonwealth, the one that used to be a prison island. So while my hockey, snow, and fox-trapping jibes are put back into storage, I am caught unprepared to make childish, snide comments about Australia.
Despite their different origins, New Buffalo doesn't sound out of place among the maple-leaf-heavy stable of Arts & Crafts. Like much of the label's populace, New Buffalo sounds like a franchise of the Broken Social Scene conglomerate, and, given the three dozen or so people in that flagship outfit, for all I know main protagonist Sally Seltmann has contributed to their communal noise. Even if she hasn't, the songs on The Last Beautiful Day have the same sort of dreamy-indie qualities Broken Social Scene has built their empire upon, an aesthetic that sounds like a glossary of the last 20 years of indie rock.
Seltmann concentrates largely on the mellow side of this history, as much of the album puts me in mind of BSS' starry, ephemeral "Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl". There's also a bit of a Cat Power thing happening here, with Seltmann excelling at the same sly, breathy vocal style as Miss Stage Fright herself. But there's considerably more optimism here than Chan Marshall would ever allow herself, as well as more complex arrangements than is usually found adorning a singer-songwriter's keyboard campfire.
Both of these differences can be heard to good measure on "Recovery," which undercuts the sunshiney twelve-step lyrics with jittery click-rhythms and sudden horn stabs. Many of the best tracks on The Last Beautiful Day sound like Seltmann is getting bleedover from the IDM band in the studio next door, culminating in the Air-ishly psychedelic "No Party". This of course makes Lazy Critic Angle #1 (just above "she's on Arts & Crafts!") "Sounds like an Estrogenized Postal Service!," but it's a not bad comparison-- just like TPS, New Buffalo's beat-tourism can lift otherwise pedestrian material ("I've Got You and You've Got Me") yet sometimes sounds cosmetic and extraneous ("It'll Be Alright").
Most of these computer-aided experiments are frontloaded; as the album goes on, the arrangements become sparser, Seltmann's sometimes-shrill voice is higher in the mix, and many of the unique elements that marked the first half are abandoned. Fortunately, there's a last-minute save with "On Sunday", an eerie track built entirely from jazz samples, right down to preserving the dusty-groove crackles, that wouldn't sound that out of place on a Jan Jelinek project. So apart from the occasional relapse into singer-songwriter solo-arrangement temptation, Seltmann proves herself a forward-thinking indie-folkster, not one to shy away from technology. With a little more development, New Buffalo might even develop a sound strong enough to dispel the Candadian, Northwest Michigander, Australian stereotypes.
