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Take a deep breath. It's going to be hard, but
you're going to have to accept that calling a song
Kenya Dig It? can be forgiven. Because if you don't,
if you judge The Ruby Suns by their track listing
alone, you'll be doing yourself a huge disservice.
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.
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