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Arts and Crafts | sallyseltmann.com |
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High in the sky, the sun is sunny. Up all the trees, the birds are chirpy. Beautiful hills of soft green Windows XP grass roll to the horizon, over which is stencilled a happy little rainbow of glocks and woodwinds. Heart That’s Pounding makes a charming impression of an indie take on children’s music.
But strewn across the desktop are unpaid bills and unfulfilled anxieties, brushed over with a watercolour of sepia and blue. When Sally sighs, “get yourself up / this is a new day” she’s not going to prance down the street with a choreographed kickline of neighbours.
There is more than a shade of They Might Be Giants to her music, but where John and John and Dan and Danny and Marty deal in sharp, nasal tones, Sally softens and withdraws into more demure textures. She looks to the future with wistful anticipation, penning songs about things yet to be done and changes yet to be made.
Sally’s shrinking shyness is her strongest asset, settling into a dip somewhere between Sara Bareilles and Sarah Blasko. The former is full to bursting with extraverted emotion, and the latter’s silver linings necessitate calling down more than a few cumulonimbi. But right in the middle are hushed confessions of big plans and bleary-eyed optimism, all the greater for the nervousness and trepidation within which they are swaddled.
‘Book Song’ imagines the beginning of a quiet new relationship in retrospect, as inked down by her future self. But when Sally articulates her true passions on the title track — “a world to fix / a tape to mix / a mind to mend / a soul to bend” — she certainly can’t be said to lack ambition.
Modesty forbid considering any personal wishes, but the distant peal of literal wedding bells hints otherwise. Perhaps over those hills and far away, Sally will one day find the satisfaction she seeks.