Entitled Until The Quiet Comes, there's little such respite within the context of the record, and indeed the jazzy interludes imprinted as irremovable hallmarks onto its predecessor have been muffled somewhat to allow for a more all-encompassing avant-garde artwork. The overriding shimmer of lounge-y tranquility remains, as do guest spots from Daedelus' other half Laura Darlington, slap bass baron Thundercat, and frequent collaborator Thom Yorke as the trio lend Ellison their ears and nimble fingers. Yet its compositional skittering and general genre skipping ensure the album does in fact bear closer semblance to art than it may to conventional album per se.
FlyLo's a collagist; always has been. The smoky tones of the Coltranes course through his most sanguine of blood, but the contact adhesives and non-toxics are here employed to fuse together some of his finest cosmic galaxy bounding to date. Only If You Wanna even recalls space-jazz khan Sun Ra, were his lasting grooves engrained in the nicotine-smeared airlessness of a downtown Chicago jazz café. These aren't songs so much as fragments of sentiment. And to derive such feeling from what is, to all extensive purposes, a hip hop LP is no mean feat.
me Yesterday//Corded is a neat reshuffle of the blurts once spurted from retro video game gear, unintelligible helium vocals, and figments of melody whilst opener All In chimes as though Ellison were sat up amidst the stars, plinking away on the distant things as though the sky were one great melodiously reprogrammed TR-505. The blunted breaks of the squelchy Putty Boy Strut, meanwhile, recall the squeaks of the Clangers set to twitch mid-tryptophan dream. Heave(n) hauls a celestial skiffle down from their tiny, blue planet for our earthly pleasures, Tiny Tortures plays off Asiatic plucked bass and electronics that sound as though they've surging aqueous stuffs sploshing about beneath the buttons, and The Nightcaller brings some glitzy slo-mo electro house to the almightiest of uptempo slumber parties. It's this one that proves a stimulating deviation for the sonic deviant when riding solo, although it's when his miscellaneous accomplices saddle up alongside him that Flying Lotus again ascends toward his late, great-aunt.
Although only out today, the Niki Randa-featuring Getting There already sounds timeless as soft electronics combat thuddy drum machines under a veil of grand vocal swells; Darlington brings an irresistible, elegantly sulky coo to Phantasm; and Erykah Badu brings some tribal mysticism to the incantatory See Thru To U. Randa reemerges on the perfectly sultry Hunger, on which zithers mirror loose bass lines on one of the most emotive Orient-inspired pieces since Gorillaz' Hong Kong. However, it's when Ellison comes into contact with fellow luminaries that Until The Quiet Comes really kicks off. Yorke's layered exhalations recall those of Noah Lennox ambling two by two toward the vessel upon which FlyLo first descended to our telluric loam, but it's Brainfeeder's very own Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat who spanks some eternal harmony into DMT Song. Most likely a eulogy to Dimethyltryptamine as opposed to Desoxymethyltestosterone given its mind-expanding properties and way-out-who-knows-where propensities, it may only be an interlude but it's a thoroughly invigorating episode in a surrealist series that's almost unbelievably addicting.
Ellison's flying high here and, as Stefan Burnett once snarled, it's such a long way down. Ain't no way FlyLo gon' fall any time soon by the seems of it, though. For the man's here eminent as ever.
