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You are dead! It was such an important job, and a turning point in the career of Flying Lotus, that his previous albums can now seem conventional by comparison. They were original and daring, but remained planted in soil cultivated by pioneers like Dilla and Madlib. You are dead! offered a different vision: ecstatic, metamorphosis, deeply collaborative and with a remarkable capacity to mask its manufacture. Where most rhythmic music is in the foreground – the fingerprints on the MPC's pads, the dust in the grooves of the wax – the 2014 album was flowing like a magical liquid without a discernible source. Where the beat music is based, You are dead! was pure steam, a lung of atoms returning swirling in the universe.
You are dead! was an album about mortality, marked by the deaths of friends, peers and family members; This reflected the increasingly cosmic significance of Steven Ellison's work as Flying Lotus, in which spiritual jazz could coexist with unhealthy jokes, sublimate it with ridicule, fantasy and ribald. This time, on his sixth album, there is no explicit theme; holding the crossing line Flamagra together seems to be the creative process itself. Ellison has been working on this album for the last five years. 10 tracks have inflated to more than two dozen. For a moment, it was considered a collection of just rhythms, not jazz. Jazz has finally found its way again thanks to longtime collaborators such as keyboardists Brandon Coleman, Dennis Hamm and Taylor Graves; multi-instrumentalist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson; and, in particular, bassist Stephen Bruner, better known as Thundercat, a key member of Brainfeeder brain trust and co-author of most of these songs. The guiding metaphor of the album was a flame on a hill. "Then I went to that party and I heard David Lynch pronounce the words that he finally kept on the record," Ellison said. And I thought, "That's all, we'll just go in that direction. ""
Despite all the clarity that may suggest the image of a flame on a hill, there is a lot of confusion and confusion. There is a lot of all; fortunately, it works both ways. There are episodes of thick and gloopy overload, but also cases of crystalline focusing; there are scenes of jazz-funk serpentines and moments of deep immobility. In keeping with a lot of rhythmic music, many of these tracks are relatively short. The abundance of one and a half minute miniatures means that, despite the sticky density of stacked keyboards and the nerve dynamics of Thundercat's agile network, there is plenty of room to breathe. On the sensory level, the music has an incredible sound, conceived with a technical dexterity that only accentuates its vast dimension.
The predominant prismatic jazz-funk predominates, but surprises are not lacking. "Andromeda", an 89-second co-written with Thundercat, resembles Flying Lotus on the post-rock version of Radiohead. "Say something", even shorter, could be Tom Waits, a soundtrack of a Wes Anderson movie. "Pygmy", a flagship title at the end of the album, plunges Thundercat's low-neck melody into tropical forest samples and a rhythm that beats like a torrent; it's as moving as it is simple.
The album looks more like a sketchbook – synths of "Takashi", a funk-lite tune built from splashed splashes resembling those of Jackson Pollack, then 11 tracks later "Debbie Is Depressed", and their recurrence as simple already seen; It's a look at Ellison's hard drive, an overview of how ideas in a session are translated into new contexts. Some of the most crisp pieces of the disc are the most rewarding: think about "Pilgrim Side Eye", a caricature-style funk miniature that transforms, in its very last seconds, into beautiful and sung chords, as soft as the breath of baby. The song, an instrument, is finished in 91 seconds; The great jazzman Herbie Hancock is somewhere out there, evolving in the ancient changes, but the horizon is horizonless. Any virtuosity comes back in the spirit of group interaction.
Tierra Whack directed "Yellow Baby", the clearest title of the album, with the most striking title, just a lean and ramshackle beat, applause and stray collars, at the base of the Philadelphia rapper's wild gyrations. Ellison builds a scaffolding for which she swings, and she takes full advantage of this shaky playground to seem stunned, while she drags dangerously behind the time. Flying Lotus is known as a maximalist, but it shows here everything that he can do with simple materials, especially when he is associated with the right partner.
Even in doses of two and three minutes, 67 minutes is a lot. A handful of tracks could probably have been reserved for a separate EP or a deluxe edition of the album. And despite the bold impression of the guests gathered – Solange, George Clinton, Toro and Me, Yukimi Nagano of the Little Dragon – we wish more remarkable songs tied with You are dead!"Never Catch Me", with Kendrick Lamar. Ellison gets closer to "More", featuring Anderson. Paak at his best declamatory. The catchphrase is an expression of the existential desire that boils down to its essence: "Life must be richer than me … I must be something more than I can say."
This is where the album comes closest to the great quest for the spirit of You are dead! Even when it targets nearer targets, it's clear that Flying Lotus is a rare talent, with enviable reach, a top-level leader beyond just the beatmaker. No wonder David Lynch gets a surrealist solo at the dead center of the album: the shocked director's autonomous universes have an obvious influence on Ellison's art. True, Flamagra may not understand a world as complex as Lynch's, and that does not advance Ellison's art in the same way as You are dead! made. But life after death is a difficult act to follow, and in the light of this flame on the hill, Flamagra makes an attractive way
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