Always known for Technicolor hip-hop odysseys, Flying Lotus has now gone fully cinematic. Following his directorial debut with the gross-out flick Kuso, Steven Ellison’s sixth album includes a short story from David Lynch and cartoonish rap miniatures such as Yellow Belly, a collaboration with R&B innovator Tierra Whack. Even on the instrumentals, Flamagra conjures visual extremities. If Hieronymus Bosch wrote ad jingles, they’d probably sound like the dismembered funk jam Pilgrim Side Eye.
In truth, FlyLo on form is too discombobulating to evoke cinema. A bellwether of the decade’s jazz renaissance, his 2010 opus Cosmogramma is less like a screen experience than a waterslide through his neural passages. Flamagra, by contrast, sometimes forgets it’s not a film, with Ellison indulging in nightmarish sketches that betray his close kinship with Adult Swim, the cartoon company for grown-ups. Despite its charismatic Tierra Whack verse, Yellow Belly plays more like a gag than an epiphany, and the clanks and warbles of Fire Is Coming fill Lynch’s eerie tale with dread but little replay value.
Still, the quagmire draws you in: Debbie Is Depressed, aiming for psychedelic impressionism, sounds unfeasibly stoned but cleanses palettes for The Climb, a dreamy Thundercat collab. The understated Solange feature Land of Honey strikes a worshipful tone then whooshes into Thank U Malcolm, a traditional FlyLo joint honouring Mac Miller. Now comfortable in that signature style, the cosmic voyager spends the rest of Flamagra in search of a planet to touch down on.
