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reviewed for FasterLouder

The Ruby Suns return with their third album Fight Softly and the overriding sense you get from the record is that main man Ryan McPhun is a restless soul when it comes to concocting his magical sounding music.

2008’s Sea Lion was full of tribal chants, indie folk percussion and electronic details that finely balanced the organic and synthetic instrumentation he employed. Two years later he has taken a wider palette of sounds but instead of causing the music to dissipate into different areas it has had the effect of creating quite a different and tightly arranged album. Natural sounding drums are muted and instead we get a much stronger electronic, in some ways, post-techno smear of digital sounds.

The two constants that connect Fight Softly to McPhun’s previous work are his vocals and an attraction to tropical and carnivalesque melodies. Never one to push the voice to the front of the mix, he has again distanced himself from the music with reverb, delay and a soft tone to his delivery. On opener Sun Lake Rinsed he is a dead ringer for Thom Yorke at his most drifting and it is a gorgeous start to the album. The words are indecipherable but it is the melancholy dreaminess that draws you in.

It isn’t as if McPhun needs to hide his vocals due to a lack of ability, it is just that he has discovered how they best serve the song. On Cinco he creates a Scritti Politti electro soul feel while Haunted House is the type of jerky, hip hop influenced song that Junior Boys have built their sound on.

Often throughout the album you can make out the original template of the song through the digitally processed mist. Traditional percussion peeks out from behind the layered bleeps and filtered effects and you get a sense of the journey McPhun has taken to transform the initial idea to a hazy, dreamy place. Listen to Closet Astrologer and you hear all manner of treatment to drums, vocals and keyboards.

Rhythm is essential to The Ruby Suns and the use of synth stabs is another new tool that crops up through the album. They almost sound like cheesy house accents, especially on How Kids Fail where they tread a fine line between annoying distraction and giving the listener a knowing smile, like a guilty pleasure.

Fight Softly is most effective when it heads for less cluttered territory like Two Humans. There is a stronger focus on dream-pop washes of sound rather than dense percussion and McPhun’s mesmerising way with a vocal melody is allowed to come to the surface. A perfect example is the closer Olympics On Pot which for the first quarter of the song sounds like a gorgeous lost 80s future-pop song before the mad scientist effect takes hold and the song becomes disjointed with unnecessary diversions into drum breakdowns. Ultimately the essence of the song is lost.