Like a sleepless night in an intemperate climate, Sun Araw's undulating edgeless psychmares stick to your clothes and leave chemtrails in your periphery. Ancient Romans, SoCal seeker Cameron Stallones' latest LP under the Sun Araw name, is another fever dream of dub-mottled organ grind and guitar squiggle, at once elemental and futuristic. Romans proves less departure from than refinement of his 2010 breakout On Patrol, a primordially textured slow-going ooze not unlike Excepter doing Earth covers over a skipping disc of Agharta. On Romans, Stallones continues rendering colossal structures in sound, dialing the scale of its predecessor back ever-so-slightly while retaining both its massive scope and its wide-eyed searcher's gaze.
With a touch more space between its sinewy guitars, warbly keyboards, and omnitextured bass thump, Romans doesn't immediately inspire the same awe the impossibly grandiose, oppressively humid On Patrol did. Those slowly mutating tunes, even when they tipped in at a quarter-hour, felt almost immaculately composed, each craggy instrument and edge-of-perception toneshift perched against the others just so. Though all of Stallones' music is built around improv, Romans feels a mite looser, more free-flowing than its predecessor, its individual movements less choreographed, its overall mood a bit more relaxed. Yet Stallones maintains his incredible compositional economy and precision; with all its moving parts, Ancient Romans can sound a bit haphazard at first, but each gurgle and whirr works in brilliant tandem, and one more element could tip any of its scales. Romans' sandstorm soundscapes and Afrobeat-indebted underwater funk are panoramic, deliriously detailed visions beamed in from some untapped back-of-the-mind vista.
Romans begins slowly, the reedy "Lucretius" rolling out like a fog. "Crown Shell" matches its dubby bass nausea to flittery desert guitar, with Stallones imparting illegible wisdom over top. What vocals do pop up on Ancient Romans are used to enormous effect; whether it's conspiratorial chants of indoctrination or chants of earthen ecstasy, Stallones' populating of his sound world with these indecipherable characters leaves them feeling at once more alien and more habitable. You can almost make out the very edges of pop song structure in the warped Zapp-and-Fela bootleg of "Crown Shell" and the snaky, sunbaked gospel "Lute and Lyre"; though Stallones' epic-length music resists hurry, it doesn't skimp on form, and even with Romans' somewhat looser feel, he never lets his instrumental wandering take him too far from the compositions.
It ends with "Impluvium", which flips the trance-like qualities of Araw's eyelid-movie music into something else entirely. Easily the danciest track in Araw's arsenal, "Impluvium" knocks, riding a chant-laden, clanky 4/4 groove off into some equatorial sunset. Up against the rest of Romans' slowmo dub-sludge, a track like "Impluvium" could well be an overreach, but Stallones' vision for Sun Araw is both so carefully controlled and so wide-- and "Impluvium", like everything that precedes it, so roughshod and naturalistic-- the tune becomes like an ideal disembarking point for Romans' steamy night-on-the-river. It's one of Stallones' finest moments to date, yet another reminder that there are few people making music either this all-encompassing or this enveloping. The mighty On Patrol brought together many of the disparate strands in Stallones' work (both as Sun Araw and his stellar Magic Lantern) into a dazzling whole, and though Romans' textures are grittier and its gaze more inward, the ground it surveys isn't too far afield from that of its predecessor. But if Romans is something of a lateral move where innovation's concerned, it's by no means a step down in quality. In the last couple years, Stallones continues to carve out what feels like uncharted territory; hard to blame him for wanting to survey the scenery a little while longer.
