CD Reviews

Sun Airway | Soft Fall

Dead Oceans Records (2012)

By JAY BREITLING | October 9, 2012

3.0 Stars

One of the more remarkable evolutions in the contemporary musical underground may be Jon Barthmus's decade-long peregrination from hardcore punk to the ambitious electro-pop of Sun Airway. The latter act's dazzling summer single "Close" — released just ahead of news that Sun Airway would support a strand of M83 live dates that wrapped recently — is Barthmus's most potent musical statement to date. It communicates intoxicating innocence via a dizzying swirl of hypertrophic melodies, splashy beats, and staccato guitar chords. The balance of Soft Fall is similarly glossy and palatable, but also decidedly sophisticated. Indeed, the string arrangements on the album sprang from sampled classical music being reduced to sheet music and then performed by a string quartet. Soft Fall may not have an outright appeal to the overground, but it's easy to see why M83's Anthony Gonzalez elected to hear this Philly project's enchanting Technicolor dream jams each night before his own.

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ARTICLES BY JAY BREITLING

HAUNTED BY SOUND, PILE IS RISING | October 30, 2012
The five-year-old quartet Pile, among the brightest of Boston's bursting subterrane, makes waltz-time, feel-bad guitar music that is gothic in the non-eyeliner sense: angular songs express the sort of specific, primal anxieties that litter a liberal-arts undergrad's coursework.

SUN AIRWAY | SOFT FALL | October 09, 2012
One of the more remarkable evolutions in the contemporary musical underground may be Jon Barthmus's decade-long peregrination from hardcore punk to the ambitious electro-pop of Sun Airway.

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