Flying Lotus: Flamagra | Review – Pitchfork

You’re Pointless! became this form of momentous section of labor, and such an inflection level in Flying Lotus’ career, that his earlier albums can now sound stale by comparison. They were current and courageous, however remained planted in soil tilled by pioneers treasure Dilla and Madlib. You’re Pointless! supplied a particular imaginative and prescient: satisfied, shapeshifting, deeply collaborative, and with a excellent skill to veil its making. Where most beat music foregrounds surfaces and processes—the fingerprints on the pads of the MPC, the dirt within the grooves of the wax—the 2014 album flowed treasure magical liquid without a discernable provide. Where beat music is grounded, You’re Pointless! became pure vapor, a lungful of atoms returned swirling into the universe.

You’re Pointless! became an album about mortality, one colored by the passing of friends, friends, and family; it reflected the increasingly cosmic scope of Steven Ellison’s work as Flying Lotus, wherein non secular jazz might per chance per chance exist aspect by aspect with sick jokes, the tidy with the ridiculous, fanciful, and ribald. This time, on his sixth album, there is now not any narrate theme; the by line holding Flamagra together appears to be like to be the creative course of itself. Ellison spent the past 5 years working on the album; 10 tracks swelled to better than two dozen. For some time, it became envisioned as a bunch of correct beats, no jazz. The jazz in the end wormed its system abet in, due to the longtime collaborators treasure keyboardists Brandon Coleman, Dennis Hamm, and Taylor Graves; multi-instrumentalist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson; and, especially, bassist Stephen Bruner, better identified as Thundercat, a key member of the Brainfeeder mind belief and a co-creator of the bulk of those songs. The album’s guiding metaphor became a flame on a hill. “Then I went to this occasion and heard David Lynch pronouncing the words that he damage up pronouncing on the file,” Ellison says. “And I became treasure, ‘That’s it, we’re correct going to streak in that direction.’”

For the complete readability that the characterize of a flame on a hill might per chance per chance counsel, there is highly lots of murk and confusion. There’s lots of every thing; fortunately, that goes each ways. There are bouts of thick, gloopy overload however moreover conditions of crystalline level of curiosity; there are serpentine jazz-funk rave-u.s.a.and moments of profound stillness. In step with lots of beat music, many of those tracks are barely quick. The abundance of minute-and-a-half of miniatures procedure that, for the complete viscous density of the stacked keyboards, and the complete worried momentum of Thundercat’s agile fretwork, there’s lots of room to breathe. On a sensory stage the music sounds nice, crafted with a technical dexterity that most effective accentuates its mountainous dimension.

Sweeping, prismatic jazz-funk predominates, however there is now not any shortage of surprises. The 89-2d “Andromeda,” a co-write with Thundercat, sounds treasure Flying Lotus’ take hang of on Radiohead’s version of put up-rock. “Utter One thing,” even shorter, might per chance per chance per chance be Tom Waits soundtracking a Wes Anderson movie. “Pygmy,” a late-album spotlight, drizzles Thundercat’s high-necked bass melody over rainforest samples and a beat that swishes treasure a speeding river; it’s as transferring as it is miles straight forward.

The album feels, above all, treasure a sketchbook—synths from “Takashi,” a funk-lite tune built from Jackson Pollack-treasure layers of spattered keys, flip up 11 tracks in a while “Debbie Is Heart-broken,” and their recurrence is better than easy déjà vu; it’s a peep into Ellison’s onerous pressure, a survey at the system solutions from a given session are carried into fresh contexts. Likely the most critical file’s most sketch-treasure objects are its most rewarding: Rep in solutions “Pilgrim Facet Behold,” a cartoonishly swaggering funk slight that flips, in its final seconds, into pleasing, sighing chords, soft as dinky one’s breath. The tune, an instrumental, is over in 91 seconds; jazz enormous Herbie Hancock is in there somewhere, scampering spherical within the antic adjustments, however the horizon is egoless. All virtuosity is channeled abet into the spirit of community interplay.

Tierra Whack pulls off the most placing enormous title flip, on “Yellow Child,” the album’s sparsest tune—correct a spindly, ramshackle beat, all errant claps and snares, underpinning the Philadelphia rapper’s wild gyrations. Ellison builds the barest of scaffolding for her to dangle from, and he or she makes the most of this rickety playground, sounding giddy as she lags dangerously within the abet of the beat. Flying Lotus is identified as a maximalist, however right here he displays how noteworthy he can scheme with easy presents, especially when paired with the most attention-grabbing associate.

Even in two- and three-minute doses, 67 minutes of this stuff is plenty. A handful of tracks might per chance per chance potentially have been situation apart for a separate EP or a deluxe version of the album. And for the complete mettlesome-print clout of the assembled company—Solange, George Clinton, Toro y Moi, Diminutive Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano—one needs for more standout songs on par with You’re Pointless!’s “By no procedure Rob Me,” that contains Kendrick Lamar. Ellison comes closest on “More,” that contains Anderson .Paak at his raspy, declamatory handiest. The hook is an expression of existential yearning boiled all the system down to its essence: “There’s gotta be more to lifestyles than myself… Gotta be somethin’ more that I will be able to’t expose.”

It’s right here that the album comes closest to the wide-characterize soul-searching of You’re Pointless! But even when he fashions his sights on closer targets, it’s clear that Flying Lotus is a uncommon expertise with enviable vary, more next-stage bandleader than mere beatmaker. No shock that David Lynch will get a surrealistic spoken-phrase solo at the pointless center of the album: The shock-headed director’s self-contained universes are an obvious affect on Ellison’s have artwork. Correct, Flamagra might per chance per chance now now not comprise nearly about as account for an international as of us that Lynch conjures, and it doesn’t push Ellison’s artwork forward within the identical system that You’re Pointless! did. But the afterlife is a onerous act to regulate to, and within the mild of that flame on the hill, Flamagra makes for a titillating system location