Innumerable artists cite
David Lynch as an inspiration, but
Steven Ellison is the only one to have had a serendipitous encounter with the filmmaker that affirmed an album's theme and led to a collaboration on its central track. At a party some point after the release of 2014's
You're Dead,
Ellison, who had been considering the thematic potential of fire, heard
Lynch spin a characteristically outré tale about an inferno threatening to engulf a neighborhood. This developed into "Fire Is Coming," a kind of radio drama vignette placed in the middle of
Flamagra, the sixth
Flying Lotus album. After
Lynch delivers the warning, normalcy by
Ellison's standard resumes with a jouncing beat, a tangly
Thundercat bass line, and a frightful chant about the element's destructive power. Fire's positive and negative associations are referenced by many of
Ellison's other collaborators here. For
Little Dragon on the dizzied "Spontaneous" --
Ellison's closest brush with pop yet -- it represents new love.
George Clinton sounds a little devilish on "Burning Down the House" (an original), shuffling funk that puts pyromaniac twists on his "Atomic Dog" and "Aqua Boogie." While the album begins with a crackle and ends with a poetic epilogue about its lasting effects, fire's role in the album elsewhere is either nonexistent or negligible. It's somewhat obscured by a straggling sequence that runs beyond an hour -- over 20 minutes longer than any previous
Flying Lotus LP. The spluttery, helter-skelter thrash-fusion instrumentals are overabundant -- duly animated and spirited, yet infrequently as riveting as they are on
Ellison's preceding sessions with welcomed holdovers such as strings master
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, keyboardist
Brandon Coleman, and two thirds of the
Bruner brigade, aka
Thundercat and drumming sibling
Ronald Jr. Most moving are "Thank U Malcolm," a skyward
Mac Miller tribute, and "Takashi," a high-velocity belter that sounds like an update of an imagined 1976 collision between
Stevie Wonder and
Return to Forever. As for the vocal numbers, the highlights -- the whirling, whomping
Anderson .Paak jam "More" and the sublime,
Thundercat-fronted "The Climb" -- spread clear and generous messages about love and resolve. Also involved are
Solange,
Shabazz Palaces,
Denzel Curry,
Tierra Whack, and
Toro y Moi, whose appearances veer from wraithlike to comically perverse, and vary to muddling effect. Somewhere in here is a 40-minute program with greater impact. Getting to know the whole thing well enough to make a custom-contracted edition is worth the time.