Fight Softly

'Fight Softly' is the new studio album by NZ's pop masters The Ruby Suns. Ryan McPhun (their prime mover) has the kind of voracious musical mind that cites as equal influences '80s New Jack Swing & modern Angolan kuduro, the Beach Boys & Britney Spears, Brazilian tropicalia & Argentinian cumbia. He's the kind of diligent, meticulous soul that spends days hunched over a laptop in a tiny rented studio in Auckland, just to perfect a sequenced drum track (mission accomplished).

'Fight Softly' is the kind of head-spinning combo of big-picture vision & sumptuous detail that only comes from an artist with a need to express all he's seen. And you can dance to it!

California-born NZ citizen McPhun took childhood trips to NZ & finally made Auckland home in 2003. Though he soon started playing with indie darlings The Brunettes, he'd been making his own music for years, 4-track bedroom stuff that mixed his faraway vocals with effects-laden guitar, synths & field-recorded samples. With his own new band, Ryan McPhun & The Ruby Suns, McPhun recorded & released his first album for Lil' Chief Records. By the time it's follow up, 'Sea Lion', was ready, the foreshortened Ruby Suns had gained an indie following in NZ, toured Aus with The Shins & the UK with Field Music. The album came out in the US on Sub Pop in early 2008 & landed on various best-of lists that year. And for a few summer months The Ruby Suns landed in Seattle. There they played Sub Pop's not-so-humble 20th anniversary festival & began work on 'Fight Softly'. In the spring of '09, The Ruby Suns took a whirlwind tour of Europe that included 10 days at a friend's spread outside Szegad, Hungary. McPhun & friends Bevan Smith (Signer, Aspen, Skallander) & Matthew Mitchell (Skallander) spent their time devouring veggie pizzas & jamming, improve-style, in an old farmhouse. These sessions didn't make it to Fight Softly as-is but were a springboard into new ideas McPhun brought back to his AK studio.

This is where 'Fight Softly' veers from the path set by its predecessor. Thematically, it's not as wide-eyed or lighthearted, picking apart the relationships faced as we pass through the world - with our surroundings, each other, ourselves. Sonically, it remains as beat-centric, though these beats are deliciously artificial - stretched & compacted & distorted beyond recognition. Melodies are scuzzy & digital, not many guitars strummed or basses plucked. McPhun's soulful upper-register croon, swallowed into the mix, replaces group chants & full-throated singalongs. Rather than an album of clearly-drawn influences, 'Fight Softly' is a unique, inscrutable synthesis, more itself than anything else.