BY JOSHUA BAYER
Daily Arts Writer
Published May 3, 2010
In case you haven't heard, Flying Lotus is kind of a big deal. Shrouded in left-field hip-hop mystique just a few months ago, the laptop virtuoso has, in the last year alone, played the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, opened up shows for Thom Yorke, debuted an original live score for “Heaven and Earth Magic” at this year’s Ann Arbor Film Festival and picked up the economical pet name “FlyLo.”
Flying Lotus
Cosmogramma
Warp
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While Cosmogramma, Lotus’s first LP since his much-deserved boom in popularity, certainly doesn’t find him attempting to streamline his sound for mass consumption, it reeks of a sort of larger-than-life ambition complex. One can vicariously feel FlyLo slipping into mad scientist mode, letting excitement overpower discretion and trying to stuff three album’s worth of creative evolution into a 42-minute record.
Flying Lotus is a musical genius, and he is fully aware of this — it’s as clear on this album as ever. The issue with Cosmogramma is not that Lotus fails to build upon his signature sloshy brand of intergalactic hip hop. To the contrary, he spirals off on a whirlwind of largely disconnected aesthetic tangents. Cosmogramma attempts to reinvent the wheel in umpteen different ways without ever really building anything sturdy.
The album’s off-puttingly in-your-face opening four minutes is the first sign that Cosmogramma isn’t quite the immaculately chiseled magnum opus one would have hoped for at this point in Lotus’s career.
As leadoff track “Clock Catcher” storms out of the gates with an atonal onslaught of obnoxiously squelchy bleep-blooping, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed, as if you’ve just walked in on two cyborgs mating. The jumbled, grating track cuts in so abruptly and arbitrarily, it almost seems like you’re listening to the tracks in the wrong order.
After about a minute of disorienting harp-trickling and assorted scribbly noises, “Catcher” jarringly stumbles into “Pickled!,” denying listeners a chance to catch their breath with its garish bass noodling, shrill tea-kettle whistling and stampede-appropriate four-on-the-floor tempo. While it’s certainly interesting to see FlyLo experimenting with a more upbeat, driving sound — “Pickled!” essentially sounds like a caricature of Squarepusher-esque drum-and-bass — the blunt stompiness of the opening three tracks suffocates Lotus’s natural penchant for head-melty hypnotics.
Elsewhere, Lotus gets jazzy, a move that naturally complements his cerebral sound, but one that he largely fails to integrate into the album's big picture. “Arkestry” wisps about seductively, layering smoky sax musings over bebop-style drum soloing, and “German Haircut” is pure ear candy with its slithery Pat Metheny-flavored guitar licking.
But while both tracks sound great, they don’t really go anywhere or establish momentum. The album is littered with well-manicured transition songs that mostly only “transition” into other fun-size dabblings, lending Cosmogramma a sloppy, mixtape-y feel — a factor especially surprising given the seamless fluidity of Lotus's live shows.
Despite the album’s overall failure to gel, when Cosmogramma clicks, it clicks. “Do the Astral Plane” spunkily consolidates the record’s eyebrow-raising loose threads, uniting Arabian Nights strings, tambourine rattles and jazzy trumpeting over an unexpectedly peppy house beat.
