It seems only natural that we should be deeply marked by our earliest experiences of music: what we hear in our earliest days - and it really could only have been ‘hearing’ when we were that young, rather than the more active ‘listening’ - literally reverberates down the paths of all our subsequent musical wanderings; and everything that comes after is informed by, and in some sense a response to, those initial exposures.

For me, those formative experiences took the form of easy listening on the AM dial of the radio, and this, of course, meant Melody above all else - and, since then (alt-rock, post-punk, shoegazer, 4ad, alt-country, etc), I’ve always found myself in some sense seeking out tunes, however buried, unfamiliar, refracted or fractured they may have been. Perhaps, then, that’s part of why listening to New Buffalo’s gorgeous debut album, The Last Beautiful Day, feels like coming home for me.

How to describe this music? Well, it sounds a bit like soft velvet, and sighing lovers, and starry nights - it’s reminiscent of Lisa Germano at her prettiest, and of the various post-Clouds Jodi Phillis projects, and of the more delicate, wistful side of His Name Is Alive; at times, it drifts into the evocative, cloud-scattered territory inhabited by fey, wide-eyed eccentrics like Stina Nordenstam and, in a slightly different vein, Tujiko Noriko; and, somehow, it never really sounds very much like any of these, existing instead in a space which is very much its own.

The Last Beautiful Day is a languorous, introspectively romantic album, at times seeming to swell with feeling and at others content simply to murmur. There’s a gentle glamour to it - Sally Seltmann (the Melbourne musician behind New Buffalo) sings in a voice which seems always on the verge of catching, and that voice threads itself through a weave of old-fashioned, treated piano, faint backing whispers, and ghostly, sampled instrumentation and tones. It’s all very intricate, and yet there’s a real feeling of space to the album; perhaps this is how it feels to float through the air, suspended…

As to the songs themselves, well, they’re something like lullabies, possessing that same beguiling sense of out-of-timeness, and tending, like lullabies, to circle recurrently around certain key melodic and lyrical figures. Indeed, there’s something dreamy about the entire proceedings, but especially in the album’s sweetest moments - songs like "I’ve Got You And You’ve Got Me" and "Yes" - in which Seltmann creates soft-edged hazes where fulfilment and yearning come together and coalesce; another highlight is opener "Recovery", which is all handclaps and sighs and poignant keys.

This really is a fabulous record, and one that will only grow in lustre over time. I hesitate over this, but it has to be said: I think that The Last Beautiful Day may just prove to be a classic.

Recommended: Yes