Sun Araw: We Are Make Psych

The murky deluge of interrelated downer, psych and drone releases from Los Angeles and Not Not Fun are at the very least confusing. Swapping members, touring together and otherwise cohabitating similar physical and conceptual places on earth and musics astral plane make for an interesting take on repeto kraut incited sounds. Some of it works better than others, although it seems that amidst each and every one of these releases from Magic Lantern and Sun Araw, there are moments that make you abandon earthly concerns for a better day in the beyond. It’s not all spaced out jams – some of it’s annoying. But if there’s a problem, the man to blame is Cameron Stallones.

Not being more than vaguely familiar with the incestuous relationship between all these groups – no one’s reached break out star status as of yet – it’s still pretty simple to hear the similarities. Although more rock induced, Magic Lantern possesses some of the spaceship summoning prowess of Sun Araw and vice versa. But that latter ensemble remains in a single territory instead of expanding out of its drum circle related jams and into muscular electrified rock. And on last year’s Beach Head everything comes together for at least a few minutes on each of the album’s four extended tracks.

The lead off “Thoughts are Bells” is basically a huge chunk of ambience as it moves through its mostly boring nine minutes – in my categorization, I don’t mean to diminish the effort that went into creating this, but at some points I might as well just turn on a vacuum cleaner and take a listen. A post house-hold appliance portion of this offering intertwines a didgeridoo – or something approximating that sound – with a slight wah-wah styled guitar loop as the track enters a monolithic build up, only to fade out. Unfortunately, that good part occurs in two minutes.

The three tracks that follow are some slight derivation from that first offering, with “Horse Steppin’” easily presenting itself as the most rock oriented, although that conception of rock might be tied to some West African pop as much as anything else. The drumming on that track is what separates it from the lackluster drones that encompass the remainder of the disc. With the ten minutes of “Beams” sounding like an excursion in sustaining a note for a really long time, again, Sun Araw refuses to sate listeners with too much until the very end of a song.

Some might decry this, but in more than one way, this is academic music. Of course, all involved would probably figure that the drugs that they (probably) enjoy so much refute that point. And in that, my perspective could be proven. A cult around same-mindedness has sprung up. This might be ‘experimental music,’ but it’s experimental when held up next to radio pop. As a genre, whatever this is has been expanding for some time now, solidifying a set of precepts as concrete and unmoving as any other music. That doesn’t make it bad, but it just seems to rely on the same concept of image and mystique as all other performers and performances.