Try to put all scepticism out of your mind and instead imagine a huge, pregnant desert sun, hanging in air so warm it burns, so still there's no breeze to offer respite, under a sky so wide you're not sure where it ends and where the Earth begins. Imagine you're barely awake, losing yourself in an horizon so far from the urban sprawl that you can't even remember how you got here as your heart beats in time to half-imagined drums.

Sea Lion, the second album from New Zealand swoonsters The Ruby Suns brings together what you might imagine Aborigine Dreamtime to sound like with African desert soundscapes and Californian experimentalism. Think Lemon Jelly with better weather and the odd hula beat. Drift away in the plains and awake on a Sumatran beach, with sand beneath your toes and the wind in your hair.

The album may dart around the globe, but the feeling of space remains, whether its the Mesa, the Mojave or the Maasai, there's a sense of music older than time, of eternity itself dissipating around the current moment as you sink into the rythmns of the Earth and become one with it. There Are Birds in particular floats off in an otherworldly drift.

Ruby Sons belong somewhere between The Beach Boys at their most blissed, world music at its most bearable, a night around a Polynesian campfire and Kieran Hebden on an Hawaiian holiday. Suffused with synths, the sound of warm summer seas and gentle drums, Sea Lion conjures up a world of delicate beauty.

And terrible though the title is, Kenya Dig It? turns out to be one of the album's standout tracks, with an almost Disney-like quality to its swirls and turns, an out-take from The Lion King soundtrack or the theme for an Arabian princess. Through it all, voices weave in and out without ever really intruding, like whispers on the sunset.

The result is warm, dreamy, evocative and beautiful, a worthy successor to 2005's self-titled debut and an album to savour under the late evening sun, once the summer arrives.

  share with:  Facebook | Digg | other sites