Steven Ellison could have gotten away with cloning 2008’s Los Angeles for his third Flying Lotus album. It would have been really easy – not to say that Los Angeles was artistically easy, only that “Los Angeles II” would have likely disappointed no one. Even with three different L.A. E.P.’s around, the complacency of following a highly successful sound would have been completely forgivable in this case. But Ellison decided to avoid that shortcut and NOT make the banger after-party album that I, for one, was absolutely hoping for. Cosmogramma heads in completely new directions; it’s 45 minutes of Ellison answering the question, “What is my next step?” And though the experiment doesn’t always have consistent momentum, there is still so much that deserves praise I can’t possibly blame him for pursuing something new.
On a first listen, it sounds like Cosmogramma is all over the place. “Clock Catcher” kicks things off with the album’s dirtiest bass line, only to fade into a shapeless interlude thirty seconds later. Then, in my most brief summary, the second and third tracks bust out into FlyLo’s brand of bebop and German electro, respectively. The entire album is similarly genre-spastic, but it definitely picks up by the fourth track, “Intro / A Cosmic Drama,” which sounds like the album’s real beginning to me. “Zodiac Shit” is the kind of beat I expected Los Angeles II would have sounded like, and the next ten minutes keep things so buttery smooth that I had no idea Thom Yorke was even on “…And the World Laughs With You” until I checked to see if the disembodied voice really was him.
What sticks out through Cosmogramma’s second half, and what I think becomes its greatest strength, is the abundance of guest instrumentalists that expand the sound. There’s harp, synths, strings, saxophone, and a bass that sounds like it was ripped right from 70’s prog rock. Each dissimilar element comes together in a product that isn’t hip-hop, isn’t neo-soul, isn’t Afro-futurist, or any genre that has described Flying Lotus. It straight-up sounds like a reinvention of jazz, and that is why Cosmogramma is a champion moment for Ellison. He is using his beats as a vehicle to bring him back to his jazz heritage, sometimes so far into them that tracks sound like live recordings done in one take. You knew that he’s John Coltrane’s nephew, right? I think Cosmogramma would have pleased Mr. Coltrane greatly.
Cosmogramma isn’t perfect, and I don’t think I will ever say it’s my favorite Flying Lotus album, but there are moments that really make me believe Ellison is poised for further transcendence. Where older material sounded like a one-man show (no doubt one of its strengths), moments in Cosmogramma come off as a group effort. Listen to “Dance of the Pseudo Nymphs” and think about how amazing it would sound as performed by a jazz combo. With Ellison texturing everything together as a bandleader, that performance would probably be chemically harmful to my brain. The most exciting and dizzying question about Cosmogramma is whether it will mark the moment when Ellison revitalized the spirit of jazz, and by extension, whether a cartoon program that aired Squidbillies was integral to that movement. He greatly succeeded in refining his signature, that sound that is distinctly his own, but the implications for his future border on scary.
Cosmogramma showed me that I underestimated the depths that FlyLo’s beat submarine could dive, and Cosmogramma is the sonic equivalent of Ellison steering it past all the pretty coral reefs and plunging towards the deep-sea trenches of his influences and his potential as an artist.
Flying Lotus – …And The World Laughs With You
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This review was written by dailybeatz contributor PJ Nutting, a Boulder, CO DJ/journalist
