The Ruby Suns, Fight Softly
A meticulous marriage of mildly psychedelic electro-pop and vivacious world-music tropes
Ryan McPhun has long been a musical maverick. Formerly the mainstay of Kiwi retro-popsters the Brunettes, the Californian-born, New Zealand-based McPhun has spent the last five years honing his band the Ruby Suns' meticulous marriage of mildly psychedelic electro-pop and vivacious world-music tropes.
On their third album, Fight Softly, McPhun downplays his usual array of indigenous African and Polynesian instrumentation in favour of a chaste, sumptuously melancholic dream-pop heavy on found sounds and reverb-laden synthesizers. Opener "Sun Lake Rinsed" is blanched and gorgeously melodic, McPhun's halting, high-register vocal oddly evocative of Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne.
When McPhun launched Ruby Suns, in 2005, he was patently in thrall to the Beach Boys, and this infatuation lingers in the spectral, Brian Wilson-y, FX-heavy melody lines that echo through layered tracks such as "Mingus And Pike" and "Closet Astrologer." Elsewhere, the hypnotic treated beats and electro-alchemy of Haunted House are a stoners' delight, while the attitudinal "How Kids Fail" opens like an MGMT out-take before accelerating into a hands-in-the-air techno tantrum. This is intricate, immaculately interwoven music and McPhun's attention to detail is prodigious throughout, but his musical lack of inhibition and infectious sense of fun ensure that Fight Softly is always a pleasure, never a chore.
