Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Psychedelic music can really turn some people off. To give these haters credit, the tunes are pretty weird. It is a lot easier to take in a typical verse-chorus-verse with the occasional cool guitar solo than it is to sit down and listen to tracks with runtimes in the double digits and little more than sweeping, slow-moving sounds to get you by. The style is usually reserved for stoners who can stand to zone out in one place for a while.
With their terribly-wimpy titled, third full-length album “Fight Softly,” New Zealand’s The Ruby Suns have simplified psychedelia down with a shot of pop. Opener “Sun Lake Rinsed” begins with slow-building shimmering synths and primary vocalist Ryan McPhun singing drawn outlines just a couple of notches up from a crawl. Were you to play the song at double speed it would probably sound club-ready, but in its original, down tempo form, it sounds spacey and psychedelic.
From here, on the Suns’ weirder aspects are slightly more subtle but always evident. “Mingus and Pike” may seem like just another attempt at ’80s new-wave, but the right set of speakers reveals layers of sound — bizarre synth lines, untraceable percussion, hints of strange voices all piled on top of each other. Following track “Cinco,” for all its catchy lyrics, is really defined by the Middle East-inspired synth effects and otherworldly warble of electronic drums.
“Cranberry” begins with a marching band beat. McPhun’s electro effects take hold like marchers from the future and he calls out wordless mini-scales. After the intro, “Cranberry” is stripped down to just a couple bouncy notes on the synthesizer as McPhun admits his fear of the world. Unfortunately, when you can actually understand what McPhun is saying it has a tendency to be a little hyper-sensitive, verging on emo — I’m still mad about “Fight Softly.”
Album centerpiece — and my personal favorite — “Closet Astrologer” really hits the drug logic of the Ruby Suns’ music home. It begins with just a strange bit of artificial reverb and finger snaps but quickly explodes in scope, like the release of a dam, holding back a slow-motion sonic tidal wave. As it spills out it changes direction, shifting the sound in different directions like the keyboard solo at the minute-and-a-half mark or McPhun’s trippy breakdown at three minutes. Ultimately it always finds it’s way back on course, like tributaries coming to the catchiest river you’ve ever swam in.
While “Closet Astrologer” may be the Ruby Suns’ trippiest slow jam, follower “Haunted House” is a fast-paced romp of weird. The beat picks up and drops off at the strangest places, often changing in nature completely from what seems like vocoder effects, to a fuzzed up synth, to slaps and claps and on and on.
Unfortunately, it’s about this point in the album where you start to feel like you “get it.” The songs may change but the general sound doesn’t. The album’s only real weakness is this general feeling that it’s more like one homogeneous blob of synth-heavy and ’80s-informed psychedelic-pop, not an album with distinct parts worth favoring over others. The running percussion of album closer “Olympics on Pot” — your new Vancouver jam — is almost enough to really get excited again, but in the end it’s just too little too late.
You can’t be too hard on The Ruby Suns, though. They haven’t done a varied thing, or even a new thing, but they have done a great thing. They’ve taken psychedelic music down from the lofty realm of Pink Floyd and their other forebears and condensed it into something catchy, fun and listenable. Weird isn’t just for the stoners anymore.
Grade: B+
