Sun Airway make in-between music, floating somewhere in the middle of form and ambience, the conscious and the subliminal. Surface pleasures abound, melodies congregate near the front, but if you want to hear what most of us would consider a song, you're going to have to lean into it a bit. In this, they're certainly not alone; between the concrete-sweat synths of chillwave to the scuzzbucket lo-fi revival to all the post-Animal Collective gobbledigook we've seen since Merriweather Post Pavilion, there's all manner of music nowadays that seems to emphasize the sound of the song as much as or more than the song itself. Could be that I haven't been putting the time in, but I'll admit that the bulk of this stuff passes through my ears without much notice; those fizzy synths can be awfully alluring from a distance, but I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find the song in the center of the swirl and come up short.
2010's Nocturne of Exploded Crystal Chandelier positioned Philly's Sun Airway among the leading lights of the in-between set. On track after track, main man Jon Barthmus dunked his psych-tinged synth-pop in a sea of fluttery, fringe-of-perception synths. On sonics alone, the appeal was immediate, but for all the record's lavish synths and intersecting textures, Barthmus never forgot to slip a song in there somewhere. As Ian Cohen noted in his review, Nocturne seemed to "[radiate] warmth instead of sounding warped by it." These weren't just a few production flourishes in search of a song, but dreamily ambitious pop tunes that seemed to form almost spontaneously out of the ether. Nocturne was in-between music in the best sense: At half-attention, it was like a prism lighting the corners of the room, but the closer you got to the thing, the more brilliant its spectrum. Much the same is true of Soft Fall, Sun Airway's sophomore nod. On the first few passes, pretty much all you'll get is texture: darting synths, cotton candy-pink reverb, springy Peter Hook basslines. Spend a little time with Soft Fall, though, and it'll change on you; the squigglevision synths fall back, revealing a smart, sneakily ambitious pop record.
Take "Wild Palms". Leave nothing but Barthmus' searching vocals and its grandly loping melody and you've got yourself a minor Coldplay hit on your hands. Thankfully not content to leave well enough alone, Barthmus leads us into the track on a incandescent synth-flicker that makes it sound like the song's forging itself out of tiny shards of light. Barthmus is in fine voice throughout Soft Fall, his delivery looser, more daring, but with more than a modicum of restraint; it's a bit like hearing Chris Martin over the PA at Jo-Ann Fabrics, or maybe the best Bono impression Kevin Drew could manage without getting up from his chair. But it's rare that he seems to lead you through these songs with a vocal; instead, all these elements prop each other up, and the song comes together from all angles. The lush, sunbaked "Laketop Swimmers" almost sounds like it was produced backwards, "Drop"-style; it'd be a fine enough tune without it, but it's a whole lot better with it, those inverted synths echoing off its slippery chorus. Barthmus has a remarkable sense of how much to gussy up, screw with, and spin around his own songs without losing their centers. Soft Fall's falters slightly on instrumental "Activity 3"; it's the record's least risky moment, the only song that seems to give everything away your first time through. But when he allows a little room for interpretation, even the interstitials can be spellbinding; "Activity 2", a sweet, glitchy Gold Panda-esque fritter, seems to bend in a new way every time I hear it.
Soft Fall's a few degrees bolder than its predecessor; there's more pulse to these tracks, more immediacy in these songs, more romantic desperation in his voice. But, two reverb-spackled, hook-hazing records in, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want Barthmus to go even bolder next time out. These are big-stage songs couched in bedroom-spangle production, and while I love Soft Fall's contradictions, I'd like to hear him push everything a little further. Barthmus is a hell of an arranger, he's really coming into his own as a songwriter, learning when to let a few words say plenty, when to crack his (pretty funny) joke about bad teenage poetry. Of course, all that wouldn't be too terribly hard to miss if you're only tuning into Soft Fall's alluring top layer, but this intersection of obfuscation and clarity seems to be on Barthmus' mind: "I try to keep the focus clear/ And sharpen you around the edge," he sings on the title track. Soft Fall, like its predecessor, refuses to give everything away at first; if you want to get close, well, you've got some work to do. If you don't, that's cool, too: Soft Fall just works, whether as a dazzling display of sumptuous synthetic ambience, rich, romantic pop, and quite a few points in between.
