Ruby Suns rises on a little adult pop on Christopher

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      Creative reinvention can be a tricky thing. Artists need to evolve, of course, but sometimes in doing so they move in directions no one else was expecting. For Ryan McPhun, that meant taking his Ruby Suns project from the subtropical rhythms and acid-washed psychedelic melodies of earlier efforts and shifting it toward something more closely resembling pop music. Sophisticated, adult pop, that is—not that greasy kids’ stuff. No one’s going to mistake the Ruby Suns’ fourth album, Christopher, for a One Direction record, but songs like “In Real Life” and “Starlight” are rife with glistening synth pads and hook-studded choruses.

      “I think I maybe alluded to it, and I was probably just too scared to do it before,” says McPhun when the Straight reaches him in the back of a taxi in Trondheim, Norway, speaking about fully embracing his more accessible side. “This time I think I just thought I would properly try and write a pop song and not sort of hide things, or hide the vocals, or add too many sounds to make it sound like kind of a wash. I was just trying to be a bit more direct.”

      For his trouble, McPhun has received more than his share of lukewarm reviews for Christopher. According to Popmatters, it’s “a largely unambitious electro-dance album that doesn’t work on electronic or dancing levels”, with reviewer David Grossman demanding to know, “Why would McPhun throw out the sounds of a delightful psych-pop band for this?”

      McPhun doesn’t appear to be too stung by such criticism. “Critics seem to want you to stay the same,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what you do, if it’s not what they wanted it to be, they’re just not going to like it. Sometimes, when you think of bands that have stuck to a sound and just release album after album that are sort of similar-sounding, there are some good examples of bands that have found quite big success in doing that. And that’s great, but I just couldn’t do that. It would be too boring for me, constantly repeating myself.”

      The Ruby Suns’ main man apparently has a similar philosophy about life in general, judging by his penchant for making long-distance moves. In the mid 2000s, he relocated from California to Auckland, New Zealand. More recently, he followed his Norwegian girlfriend to her homeland, where he now has a temporary residence permit. Norway, in fact, is where much of Christopher took shape.

      “The first few songs were made here, and the following year I was here for a while and at least made the skeletons of quite a few of the songs,” he recalls. “It was after I finished the album that I realized that, ‘Oh, gosh, at least half of it was done in Norway.’ ”

      McPhun says he has plans to head back to Auckland for the summer before returning to Europe. Where he’ll end up after that is anyone’s guess, but this much is certain: he won’t go into his next musical venture fretting about whether the critics will embrace it.

      “You can only worry about that so much,” he says. “You just have to do what you want to do.”

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