So, Monday it was The Album Leaf, Tuesday we had Beach House, Wednesday was AFCGT, and yesterday we had Retribution Gospel Choir. Closing out our week of Sub Pop/Record Store Day Vinyl Giveaways is the new one from The Ruby Suns, ‘Fight Softly.’
That’s a darn fine giveaway week, I’m thinking.
The prime mover of The Ruby Suns, Ryan McPhun has literally traveled around the world to arrive at Fight Softly, the band’s 2nd album for Sub Pop, and 3rd overall. McPhun possesses (or is possessed by…) a voracious musical mind and this new album is the kind of head-spinning combination of big-picture vision and sumptuous detail that only comes from an artist with an urgent need to express all the stuff he’s seen. And you can dance to it!
Fight Softly veers from the path set by its predecessor, the 2008 release Sea Lion. 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 and compacted and distorted beyond recognition.
Melodies are scuzzy and digital, no guitars strummed or basses plucked. McPhun’s soulful upper-register croon, swallowed into the mix, replaces group chants and full-throated singalongs. Rather than an album of clearly-drawn influences, Fight Softly is a unique, inscrutable synthesis, more itself than anything else.
The rules can’t be any simpler for our Sub Pop LP Giveaways this week: each day this week we’ll be launching a new Sub Pop RSD2010 Vinyl Giveaway and all you need to do to enter to win is to leave a comment in the comments section to that week’s giveaway letting us know why you deserve to win that week’s LP.
Be creative, funny, incisive—whatever it takes to grab our attention to deem you the winner. Most important however is to leave us a contact email address! You can be brilliant as hell, but if we can’t track ya’ down, you’re out of the running.
All winners will all be notified on Monday (3/1) upon the launch of the next RSD2010 Vinyl Giveaway!
