Flying Lotus Delivers A Gem
Guest vocalists and old inspirations make Los Angeles shine.
Flying Lotus
Los Angeles
Released on Jun 10, 2008
Hip-hop and golden era jazz (Miles Davis and the like), in hindsight, seemed to grow up siblings, removed in artistic principles by about 30 years. The frail dimensions of creativity and improvisation within these genres, spiraling musically both into and out of control, have lent some of the most creative minds to music history. And the generations that follow are usually no exceptions.
Warp Records's Flying Lotus stormed onto the independent hip-hop scene with the passion of a gas-soaked phoenix, and burned a trail just a bright and nearly as scorching hot to walk upon. Appropriately enough, members of his family had accomplished just the same, passing the artistic "quest for fire" down through the generations.
Lotus, as the great-nephew of the late Alice and John Coltrane, is exposing himself artistically to the world as hair apparent to the throne of Coltrane creativity, and his latest album shows us why. Lotus' second release on Warp Records, Los Angeles, is a 17-track journey through the broken and bent circuits of his broken video game systems, a horde of drum machines, loads of static and creativity that is unparalled in the spectrum of trip-hop.
Upon diving into the album's first tracks, "Brainfeeder" and "Breathe Something/Stellar Star", the odd, sometimes off-kilter boom-bap nature of Lotus' compositions don't necessarily lend themselves to head nods from the most trusting of hip-hop listeners. However, Lotus' ability to force the listener to search for the multiplicity of layers inside every song is one of the features of true beauty inside the way he makes music. Nothing is missed, and no odd-shaped stone unturned.
By the middle of the album, with cuts such as "GNG BNG" and "Parisian Goldfish", Lotus begins to show shades his inspirations, taking ambient cues from artists like Terry Riley, the electronic attack of artists like Daedelus and the bravery inside the genre of hip-hop from the late great J Dilla.
However, it seems as though the real gems of Los Angeles come when Lotus features people on his tracks, especially those that either compliment or play stark, organized contrast to the grimy surface of some of his tracks. Gonja Sufi graces "Testament" with a rasp that glides soothingly under the radar of Lotus' down tempo drawl. On the other side of the coin, songstress Dolly's feature on "RobertaFlack" has a smoother voice navigating Lotus' dusty, awkward rhythms. Given this, Lotus would have made an even better album with a few more guest songstresses, with perhaps even a few returning guests from his previous musical offering, The Reset EP.
Perhaps the only fault of this album is its "learning curve." Those who haven't been exposed to the more experimental side of hip-hop instrumentals might find this album a bit hard to digest, or may pick at it, choosing not to consume it whole. Indeed, Los Angeles plays well towards its name: truly a massive amount to explore, perhaps best done one track at a time; sometimes pleasurable to get lost, explore the same haunts, and still somehow manage to wander back home.
High Point
A dead heat between "Beginner's Falafel" and "Testament"
Low Point
"Orbit 405"
Posted by Ed Moses on Jun 30, 2008 @ 8:12 am
