Flying Lotus’ career has gone from a euphoric trip to the part of the night where the most fried guy at the hang seizes the remote and forces the group through one YouTube video after another while everyone wills themselves to pass out. His proper albums have gone from a steady stream to a trickle to a drought (it’s been nearly seven years since Flamagra), with the L.A. beat-scene emeritus taking on a number of odd jobs in the meantime: Magic Johnson docuseries themes; iPhone ringtones; Netflix anime scores; and of course his own bugged-out movies, which have ranged from harmlessly shlocky to unbearable.
It’s not a shocker that the signature craftsman of the Adult Swim bumper would eventually follow his muse to the Hollywood film set. But all these extracurriculars have betrayed an ever-lowering standard, particularly as what music he has released has settled into an exceedingly safe mode of CBD R&B, weighed down by an expanding posse of collaborators in place of fresh ideas.
No score yet, be the first to add.
If BIG MAMA is an attempt to slap himself out of this funk, it’s not an encouraging one. Recorded following the filming of his latest sci-fi, Ash (whose score is some of FlyLo’s most boilerplate, Stranger-Things-backwash sounding music yet), this short, seven-song EP dips back into the frantic BPMs of his earlier releases to see if there’s any juice left in the cartridge. Wheeling out the trusty 8-bit bursts of Pattern+Grid World and free-jazzy breaks of You’re Dead!, BIG MAMA goes a lot of places in a short amount of time, taking a miniature tour through the FlyLo playbook at its danciest. He rarely seems concerned with whether all these puzzle pieces actually fit together, let alone with the electricity and nuance of his most inspired work. Like a fly zig-zagging around the room, he feels annoyingly stuck.
The main thing BIG MAMA has going for it is flow. As FlyLo leapfrogs from one clubby snippet to another, he demonstrates a professional’s touch for stitching his transitions together. “Antelope Onigiri” squeezes about 10 different breakdowns into its acid-bass charge in under two minutes, imbuing them all with a degree of showmanship. The space-jazzy “Pink Dream,” with its arcade melodies and Alice Coltrane pianos, similarly seems to be in a constant state of building up or self-imploding. It’s a well-rehearsed routine, but despite FlyLo’s cartoonish stop-starting, everything ends up sounding frustratingly rote, and never as thrilling or unexpected as it should be. As he continually fires off more and more winding notes and beat switches throughout “Pink Dream,” they can’t help but blur together into a gradual accumulation of zany slush.
What makes it particularly deflating is that FlyLo used to do zany slush quite well. Go back and listen to Cosmogramma; hear just how tightly packed it sounds? Given how much the lo-fi radio landscape owes to spacious chiller odysseys like Los Angeles and Until the Quiet Comes, what’s really set Flying Lotus apart at his best has been his ability to cram the entire universe into a thimble. As much as he tries to shoehorn that kind of detail into BIG MAMA, he’s grasping at air. “Horse Nuke” tumbles from an opening drone into a stampede of Jersey-ish sub-bass booms and plasticky arpeggios reminiscent of deconstructed club, pulling itself in multiple directions that can’t quite gel. In a decade where electronic production has been pushed to chaotic new extremes, FlyLo’s moves here are tame by comparison. Even when he stops for breath on “In the Forest – Day,” he adds only the lightest bit of layering and looping to take it beyond standard-fare Game Boy music.
