By the mid 1970s, Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark Studios in Jamaica was conjuring unequivocal reggae albums (not to mention singles and special dub plates for soundsystem battles) at a possessed rate. There was the soulful work on Junior Byles' Beat Down Babylon and George Faith's To Be a Lover, Doctor Alimantado's raucous Best Dressed Chicken in Town, the drum-drug of Ras Michael & the Sons of Nagus' Love Thy Neighbour, Junior Murvin's trenchant and keen Police and Thieves, Max Romeo's loverman-cum-revolutionary on Revelation Time and War Ina Babylon. And then there was the epochal Heart of the Congos, the 1977 album cut by the Rastarian duo of the same name. "Ashanti" Roy Johnson and Cedric Myton formed as a vocal duo, but to their already celestial vocal harmonies (perhaps if Curtis Mayfield and Barry Gibb had intermingled their throats), Scratch added the thunderous baritone of Watty Burnett to the Heart mix, which at times also included the harmonized mewl of a zombie cow. Now is not the place to unpack the majesty that is Heart of the Congos (where a song like "Ark of the Covenant" sounds exactly like that). Suffice to say it placed higher than any other reggae album in Pitchfork's survey of the 1970s, and former editor Scott Plagehoef waxed rhapsodic on those angelic voices that "contemplate spiritual awakening, cultural pride and human weakness (while) Perry practices a sort of addition by subtraction." Even if he does put incants to Stevie Wonder, Bo Diddley, and Don Cherry on his most dubbed-out albums (see my personal highlight, Heavy Deeds, where the flange droops like Dr. Alimantado's zipper), Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones hews closest to Perry's cosmic swamp noise. Having Stallones-- with fellow West Coast noisenik M. Geddes Gengras-- venture to the wilds of Jamaica to record with the Congos (a four-piece now with the addition of touring member Kenroy Fyffe) makes a strange sort of sense. As long as you don't think too hard about stoned white guys tripping down to a third-world country seeking spiritual communion. "With the Congos, if we had gone there and tried to be 'Hey, we're coming to you as white musicians from America... and we're going to do it in this way...' [we'd have been] setting up a hierarchy," Stallones told the Wire in a recent cover story. "As if [we're] understanding the situation more clearly than they do. And that's incredibly condescending. And incredibly false." There are moments of each party feeling the other out, resulting in an album that grows more assured only as it goes deeper. And for this collaboration, it sounds like Sun Araw are practicing sonic subtraction rather than addition. "Happy Song" squiggles around Johnson's unwonted high register, guitars snake like something out of Black Dice's Creature Comforts, all of it underpinned by massive hand-drum bass drops. Between those canyonesque drops and the Nyabinghi drums that open "Invocation", this might spur UK dubstep producers like Shackleton and T++ to book the next flight to Kingston. A paean to "Sunshine" slinks at a crawl, the Congos incanting that it's "time to make a move, time to get you in the groove" while Gengras and Sun Araw instead proceed like a Pocahaunted acid folk processional. In that same article, Stallones hints that even he was uncertain of how the Congos might react to the alien, non-roots music presented before them. And at the fore of the album, there are instances where the Congos sound hesitant on such terrain. Peak-wise, there are more transcendent vocal harmonies to be heard on Heart's bountiful "Fisherman" than on the entire first side here. But then a shift occurs: "At some point a little bit further into the recording though, [Ashanti Roy] turned to me and said, 'Oh, they're like chants.' And from that point it made so much sense to everyone." So as the album closes on "Invocation" and the ethereal lagoon drift of "Thanks and Praise", the symbiosis between both parties levitates to another plane, beyond dub, dancehall, roots, Ancient Romans, never really sounding like anything of the aforementioned genres. It's not the best reggae album of 2012, nor the best noise album, but it's undoubtedly the best psychedelic gospel album you'll hear all year. What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series (see here and here) is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album. Nor is it a recording-artists-of-a-bygone-era-aligning-themselves-with-youth project. While Heart of the Congos' most repeated refrain remains "we've got to reach a higher ground," when Icon Give Thank succeeds, it's when the six men instead find common ground. By Andy Beta