Flying Lotus - Golden Diva (Warp 2008)
Flying Lotus - Los Angeles / Warp
It's no secret that as a collective group of people here on Audiversity, we can really only agree on one guy: Otis Jackson Jr. But if Madlib and all his many wondrous incarnations is our intersection, Flying Lotus tags in as his alternate. This relationship has been in chrysalis for a long time: Steven Ellison emerged from beneath anonymous 30-second "Adult Swim" spots when his Plug Research debut 1983 dropped in late '06. Initially, there was more excitement over the music nerdery connect-the-dots in his great-nephew status to Alice Coltrane than there was to the actual Brazilian-influenced beats. Which were, incidentally, formidable.
But if FlyLo was the best representation of a great label in Plug Research, his move to Warp last fall was a calculated stab at building bigger bridges. The Reset EP showed a producer focusing in on a sound he had already established to startling effect. Indeed, there was something intuitively great about the music he was making in the sense that, while ostensibly based on the off-kilter creations of Dilla and Madlib culled from bargain funk bins, Lotus was also incorporating some of that world flavor via Brazil in addition to his natural jazz impulses and a touch of the avant-garde everything.
When Los Angeles leaked in late April, the results of his labors were not necessarily what had been expected. Reset was a modest six tracks that wrapped up tidily in under 20 minutes; Los Angeles is a comparatively bloated work at 17 tracks, but that's not looking at the time, which is just over 43 minutes. All of this silly numbers crunching means that Lotus has sharpened his game in a different way for his sophomore LP. This time around, he has honed in on song length rather than a specific sonic template.
And I'll admit, when I first heard it, I was lost. This was a record I had been so hopeful for showing the future of left-field hip-hop (and all requisite "or whatevers") that at first I did not understand what was going on here. Songs flew by, cursory hearings blurring the lines between "Comet Course" and "Sleepy Dinosaur," the vocal tracks tacked on the end seeming to be too little too late. Where was the development? Where was the progress? Where was that "Massage Situation" moment for every track, the mini epiphanies spread out over a manageable size of songs? Instead of feeling like a fully formed work, Los Angeles felt like the city that it represents: a patchwork quilt of sounds held together by a dense blanket of smog.
But the more I played it, the more I came around. Here's the best part about this album: You likely won't like it on your first listen. Or your second. Probably not even your third. You'll only find a handful of songs you can actually remember on the first go-around, maybe "RobertaFlack (feat. Dolly)" or maybe "Golden Diva." But each successive replay merits a new song you're rediscovering for the first time, until eventually you realize you love all 17 just as you swore you didn't have the capacity to because your iPod is too clogged up with the new Wolf Parade or Fleet Foxes or some damn thing.
While it may be a revelatory work in listening, it's not really a revelation. Instead of perfecting one idea, Ellison has blown open a galaxy of sounds to pursue on future records. In that sense at least, Los Angeles is incomplete: It is not the endpoint of Flying Lotus. This is not his "arrival" per se, because there is still too much development going on. Maybe he'll never arrive or never have a marquee record that everyone can point to and say, "At least he got it all completely right for that."
And you know what? As long as he continues generating beats as disparate, as dirty, as straight-up fucking heavy as the ones he's presented here, he won't need one. I understand that Ellison was upset when this record leaked; I don't blame him for it and the argument of sharing vs. keeping to yourself isn't one I want to get into here. But I will say this: You just witnessed my excitement for this record peak on the eve of its release. All of the enthusiasm for those who waited patiently will be rewarded with his most dramatic album art yet and a killer record from a ceaselessly creative mind. Last fall, Michael said that his Warp debut would require us to start using terms like, "the next phase of instrumental hip-hop has arrived." Well, not quite. Los Angeles is the future, but it's also the past, the present, the solid, the liquid, gas, plasma, atoms and quarks, particles and participles, broken and bent and sent through wormholes to our ears. It's a culmination of everything we know, everything we've ever learned about hip-hop, about funk, about soul. Real soul. It's a reason to keep loving music. Not bad for a mere mortal, anyway.
