Artist Biography

Fight Softly is the second album for Sub Pop by New Zealands 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 and modern Angolan kuduro, Fleetwood Mac and Britney Spears, Brazilian tropicalia and Argentinean cumbia. Hes the kind of diligent, meticulous soul that spends days hunched over a laptop in a tiny rented studio in Auckland, NZ just to perfect a sequenced drum track (mission accomplished). And Fight Softly is the kind of headspinning combination of bigpicture vision and sumptuous detail that only comes from an artist with an urgent need to express all the stuff hes seen. And you can dance to it!

Californiaborn (and New Zealand citizen) McPhun took childhood trips to New Zealand and finally made Auckland home in 2003. Though he soon started playing with Kiwi indie darlings The Brunettes, hed been making his own music for years fourtrack bedroom stuff that mixed his faraway vocals with effectsladen guitar, synths, and all manner of fieldrecorded samples. With his own new band, Ryan McPhun and The Ruby Suns, McPhun recorded and released his first album for NZ label Lil Chief Records. By the time its followup, Sea Lion, was ready the foreshortened Ruby Suns had gained a college following in New Zealand and toured Australia with The Shins and the UK with Field Music, among others. The album came out on Sub Pop in early 2008 and landed on various bestof lists that year.

And for a few summer months The Ruby Suns landed in Seattle. There they played Sub Pops notsohumble 20th anniversary festival and began work on Fight Softly. 'Mingus and Pike' is about their temporary Victorian abode and its happygolucky pit bull mascot Mingus; 'Cranberry' captures a day trip to Cranberry Lake, a dream of a swimminghole 90 minutes from Seattle on Fidalgo Island. The former is beatbuzzed bedroom R&B swathed in reverb while the latter is part tequiladrunk marching band, part Eastern Bloc candy rave.

In the spring of 09, The Ruby Suns took a whirlwind tour of Europe that included 10 days at a friends spread outside Szeged, Hungary. McPhun and friends Bevan Smith (Signer, Aspen, Skallander) and Matthew Mitchell (Skallander, Muriel Tsains) spent their time devouring veggie pizzas and jamming, improvstyle, in an old farmhouse. These sessions didnt make it to Fight Softly asis but were a springboard into new ideas McPhun brought back to his Auckland studio.

Like 'Closet Astrologer,' a song that started in Hungary and concluded, vaporous and Vangelislike, in New Zealand. Or 'How Kids Fail,' a multimovement epic that sounds like a posttechno hymn and nods to How Children Fail, John Holts groundbreaking book on the general outoftouchness of the public education system. 'Haunted House' bounces on a pitchshifted vocal sample and bubbly synth line, simultaneously lush and minimal. 'Cinco' and 'Dusty Fruit' share a similar digitaltropical soul.

This is where Fight Softly veers from the path set by its predecessor. Thematically, its not as wideeyed or lighthearted, picking apart the relationships faced as we pass through the worldwith our surroundings, each other, ourselves. Sonically, it remains as beatcentric, though these beats are deliciously artificial stretched and compacted and distorted beyond recognition. Melodies are scuzzy and digital, no guitars strummed or basses plucked. McPhuns soulful upperregister croon, swallowed into the mix, replaces group chants and fullthroated singalongs. Rather than an album of clearlydrawn influences, Fight Softly is a unique, inscrutable synthesis, more itself than anything else.