You could easily pigeonhole Soft Fall, the second album by Jon Barthmus as Sun Airway, as “Grey’s Anatomy”-inspired, post-Postal Service laptop-pop. But while other acts have flooded the genre with sickly sweet, male/female tradeoffs a la “Nothing Better,†Barthmus has taken his sonic cues from Postal Service producer extraordinaire Jimmy Tamborello’s work as Dntel, with soaring gestures made through cinematic production and endearing melodies.
Barthmus also careens along the same emotional causeway Broken Social Scene seemed to pave on You Forgot it in People, fraught with nostalgic portraits of missed opportunities and dramatic highs and lows. Processed washes of symphonic revelry flow underneath nearly every moment, while synthetic percussion keeps the beat.
The end result falls somewhere between M83’s rushing electro-pop and Homogenic-era Bjork balladry, and while at a glance it seems like you’ve heard this done a thousand times over, Soft Fall manages to stake a sizeable claim in a largely boring territory.
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