I mean, the sheer cheek of it. There had been enough of an internet buzz about Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, for me to know that Heavy Deeds had nothing to do with Little Stevie in his Motown heyday. Putting George Clinton on the front might have better hinted at the hypnotic psychedelic sludgefests within (Fundadelic's self-titled 1970 debut album is an obvious reference point), but Wonder's presence just seems to be pure mischief-making.
Perhaps the point is that Stallones, who is also responsible for all the artwork, is locating the inspiration for Heavy Deeds clearly in that late 1960s/ early 1970s period where rock still thought it could change the world, where spiritual exploration with a guitar or keyboard in your hand wasn't yet seen as cheesy and deluded.
Stallones may be filtering through a lot of 40 year old influences on Heavy Deeds and working on his own in the studio but he's far from a lone traveller on this particular sonic trip, with the psychedelic drone experiments of Neon Indian and his Not Not Fun label-mates Pocahunted floating in a similar stratosphere.
What makes Heavy Deeds stand out is how beautifully constructed it is. On first listen, it's easy to assume a bunch of stoners have simply cooked up some sloppy, dazed jams one hot night but the more you peer into the murk, the more you find it all fits together remarkably well.
It's curious that Stallones chose to record Heavy Deeds on his own, despite the vibe being very much communal. Music usually gets made by those oddball bands that come across more like a gang bordering on religious cult - Funkadelic fit the bill again, along with Sunburned Hand Of The Man or The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
The easy assumption is that Heavy Deeds is inspired by pharmaceutical exploration but Stallones is the child of academic parents who met his wife while they were both studying at an Evangelical Christian college. As a lapsed believer, his music seems to take on the search for transcendance.
I've no idea if Stallones is a straight edger but he reminds me of Wayne Coyne, a man who makes what often gets described as making 'druggy' music without actually taking any drugs to do it. Of course, Coyne has plenty of (hazy) memories to inspire him but the point is that may be, whisper it, the best way to make psychedelic music is to do it when you're actually sober.
In interview, Stallones comes over as a strange combination of part rigorous artist, part stoner dude. One minute he'll talking about the influence on his music of film-makers such as Tarkovsky, Altman and Greenaway, or 1960s free jazz (the band name is a riff on Sun Ra), the next saying things like: "At the center of most of my songs there is an object that has been retrieved. The song then takes a walk around that object and attempts to scope all 360 degrees." Like, whoa.
Sobriety certainly isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you put the needle on to side one of Heavy Deeds and the molasses thick wucka-wucka wah-wah of Stallones' guitar starts to ooze out of your speakers. Seemingly disparate elements slowly unfurl in a very Sunburned Hand Of The Man fashion before it starts to coalesce a minute in when the warped, murky, multi-tracked vocals begin to chant "It's all right/ Baby, it's all right".
The sonics are thick and sticky, like it was recorded on cheap equipment in a basement late on a hot summer night. The plodding drums are so muffled that they sound like they're coming through the wall. Imagine the most hazy parts of Exile On Main Street, say I Just Want To See His Face, then make it sound 50% more swampy and you're getting the picture.
The incantatory vibe feels like it's slowly winding down until a six-note organ riff emerges six minutes in and it starts to build again. Luminescent keyboard drones cluster and Stallones insistence that it's "all right" suddenly makes perfect sense. When it finally runs out of steam just short of the ten minute mark, you actually feel like you've been cut short.
Hustle & Bustle starts on a slow peal of guitar and drifting clouds of shimmering keyboards, Stallones' smothered vocals declaiming something no doubt mystical and righteous before he decides to wig out with an echo-drenched Eddie Hazel guitar solo.
The Message introduces acoustic guitars and more glimmering organ sounds, with Stallones insisting that "I'll fly my way home: - in the context of the four other songs feels like a skinny sliver of a song at just under five minutes long.
Side two starts with more drifting organ sounds mixed with the sound of breaking glass on Get Low. As much as Stallones likes to expand on his music in interviews, he's a fervent minimalist when it comes to his lyrics, repeatedly insisting "Fly away" as the song slowly ebbs away into an ambient twinkle before bursting into warped and greasy bass-heavy funk groove.
All Night Long sounds like exactly the kind of jam that could live up to its name, an organ solo drifting over a low-slung bass groove as those scuzzy vocals chant the title over and over again. A sloppy funk guitar solo drifts in and out of the haze and those shimmering, droning keyboards slowly build up a head of steam over 12 unhurried minutes.
It's not surprising that Stallones revisited this epic psych-trance sound again for last year's On Patrol LP, stretching out over a double album that's nearly twice as long as Heavy Deeds. But at 41 minutes, this is the one that I find myself coming back to, largely because he managed to create such a concise distillation of a sprawling, hypnotic sound. Stallones has described Heavy Deeds as "a point of total ascension" - or as Stevie would put it, this is music of the mind.
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