Sun Araw's Rapid Response EP Finds the Angels Singing

Cameron Stallones shouts "That's the angels singing!" two and a half minutes into "Proper," the opening track of Sun Araw's new three-song, half-hour EP, Rapid Response. The exclamation is the record's thesis. Stallones, the L.A. psych-rock mainstay, has spent years scattering distant affirmations through his extended jams — one critic likens him to a heavily sedated hype man — but here he abandons all restraint the moment a synth chord lands right.

Where do the "angels" come from?

There is a research trail behind the joke. In a 1989 study, Plymouth University professor Joel D. Funk found that the music of new age artists such as Iasos and Jonn Serrie most closely matched what people who had near-death experiences reported hearing in their heads while dying. That, per the review, is the exact vein Stallones taps across Rapid Response's 29 minutes.

The claim deserves a caveat. Sun Araw's catalogue has always pledged deep fidelity to the dark, heady side of 1970s funk and rock, not to deathbed bliss. But the reviewer notes the project has also "fluttered just faintly at the edge of the good-vibes universe" that emerged once hippies got money and moved north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Stallones' collaborative range supports the point: he has worked with both the Congos, reggae's great vocal institution, and Laraaji, the zither-playing ambient mystic.

Is the new age revival still fresh?

The reviewer says no — the revival is "a little stale at this point" — but argues Stallones can take any style and make it do flips. The evidence: his 2017 album The Saddle of the Increate anticipated the ambient-country wave and has, in the reviewer's judgment, aged remarkably well.

Every moment of the EP carries what the review calls Stallones' "distinct sensibility," one that beckons toward the apprehension a child might feel looking at a weird uncle's record collection. Warmth, in other words, with an undertow.

The closing track makes the case. "Clear Tint Ether" spends 12 minutes on comparatively tame, unadventurous synth music — yet it carries a pervasive effect that sounds, in the reviewer's words, like someone clomping on a wooden floor in hunting boots. "Not the kind of thing you want to hear during a massage," the review notes. Two-thirds of the way through, a guitar solo barges in, instantly evoking Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4 — the 1984 touchstone the reviewer calls "as neat a link between the '70s and '80s bliss-out cultures as you can conjure."

What does this change for listeners? A proven psychedelic craftsman has turned a tired revival into something uneasy and specific, and the 12 minutes of "Clear Tint Ether" — boots, solo and all — suggest the LP-length statements may still be where he does his best work.