Guess which Sun Araw release I’m describing: syrupy guitars, dubbed-out bass stabs, echoing keyboards, chanting vocals, and tribal rhythms melt into each other to form a primordial stew of spacious psychedelic drones.
The answer, of course, is “all of them,” which exemplifies Cameron Stallones’s greatest strength (or shortcoming, depending on your perspective): he is consistent. All of his albums generally sound the same; individual tracks may vary, but their resulting texture is always hazy, thick, and stoner-friendly. Ancient Romans, his new double LP released on his own Sun Ark imprint, seems to resolutely offer more of the same: “This is what I’m good at,” Stallones suggests, “and if you don’t like it then too bad.”
I could go into a track-by-track breakdown here, but what’s the point? Do I really need to inform you that “Lucretius” and “Crete” are chill, unspooling layers of noise and gelatinous chords? Did you expect songs like “Crown Shell” to include anything but wandering guitar, reverb-soaked incomprehensible singing, mystical organs, and an unobtrusive but steady beat? No, I think you know all this; in fact, if you’ve been looking forward to Ancient Romans then it’s fair to say that you’ve expected to hear these particular sounds. After all, Stallones is good at what he does, and even at their most meandering his songs never get boring or stale.
So instead, let’s talk about the one track that blows the rest of the album out of the water, the one that offers a more exciting kind of moss for Sun Araw’s slowly rolling stone. “Impluvium” is the closing track, a fifteen-minute epic that uses a surprisingly driving beat and sometimes hilariously flippant falsetto vocals to bring a trance-inflected vision to life. Its synth-organ line reminds me of Umberto’s recent “Freeze!” 7” for Not Not Fun, and such self-aware nostalgic jockeying is a pose I wouldn’t expect Stallones to strike. But he does, and he does it well; instead of pandering to half-remembered visions of the 80s, Stallones uses this template to craft an upbeat epic that both meticulously builds towards some unimaginably smoky climax and crumbles apart at the same time — the rise and fall of musical ruins, played in double-time.
“Impluvium” makes up for the rest of the album’s sameness. It proves that Stallones is actually a masterful psych conductor, able to direct his gooey wisps of sound in a danceable direction. “Impluvium” isn’t exactly a four-to-the-floor anthem, but it possesses a vivacious energy at which he’s only hinted on the preceding seven tracks on the album. Indeed, Ancient Romans is a mostly good record that ends on a terrific high note; here’s to hoping that Sun Araw can maintain this momentum on the future, instead of falling back on the reliable old drones he’s offered us so many times in the past. There’s nothing wrong with being reliable, but the ruins we tourists see today are remnants of structures that exceeded the ordinary and in fact remain memorable because of their especially impressive construction. In other words, eight tracks of “Impluvium” would have made Ancient Romans a classic, even transgressive release. At least we know now what he’s capable of producing.
