Album Review: The Ruby Suns – Fight Softly

The Ruby Suns is the nom de guerre of the wonderfully named Ryan McPhun. Having relocated from California to New Zealand, McPhun released his eponymous debut to critical acclaim. Five years later, away from the beach scented and world music melodies of previous offerings, we have third release Fight Softly, an album that finds McPhun et al dallying with a more electric sound, a sound that looks likely to polarises opinions.

Opener ‘Sun Lake Rinsed’ demonstrates that the Ruby Suns have taken their seat aboard the electro-psychedelic folk wagon that’s been gathering momentum since bands such as Animal Collective and Yeasayer made it palatable for the mainstream. However, Fight Softly is much less poppy affair whilst still embracing a dizzying array of backward merry-go-round beats. Occasionally it works, often it falters.

There are snippets of genuinely jubilant compositions, such as ‘Dusty Fruit’, a song that masterfully blends African drum rhythms and electronics with absolutely superb results. ‘Cranberry’ gains danceable momentum again via a massive dropping African beat and an oddly placed rave synth toward the latter half of the song. Think Panda Bear’s ‘Comfy in Nautica’, but faster and with an odd synth tacked onto the end. This then leads into ‘Closet Astronomer’, indicative of an ability to construct multi-layered, capacious and dream-like realms of sound one can quite comfortably get lost in.

Elsewhere it’s often claustrophobic production that fails in allowing many of the tracks the air necessary to really climb. The vocals are drowned in reverb and muddy amongst two-dimensional layering. Adding to these inaccessible vocals, tracks such as ‘Cinco’, ‘Haunted House’, ‘How Kids Fail’ and ‘Two Humans’ seem deliriously unfocussed, becoming a racket of ever changing drum patterns, awful choral synths and generally unsettled composition. It becomes a merry-go-round one would rather get off. Too often the tracks are restless and whimsical to the point of drunken tedium, while continually failing to build to something worthwhile.

Where care free harmonies, quirky instrumentation and beguiling melodies once marked Ruby Suns as a band worth keeping tabs on, Fight Softly sees them progress into abstract and self indulgent territories. Organic and buoyant songs are replaced with electronic and often impenetrable ones, devoid of any instruments other than looping samples and synths. Leaving you with an overwhelmingly nonplussed feeling, it’s difficult to gauge whether this will be an album you’ll want to return to.