:: Record Review

Flying Lotus

Reset EP
(Warp; 2007)

Rating: 68%

Flying Lotus’ 1983 was one of the best albums of 2006; it just took me about twenty listens before I realized that. A subdued palette gets deft brush strokes appreciated but of course in those cases you have to put your glasses on and spend a long minute looking close. Along with Dilla’s Donuts (2006), I think 1983 is actually one of the best instrumental hip-hop albums at realizing that immediacy isn’t always “immediate”—that sometimes the music you really feel the most is not what’s playing during the party but what’s chasing the bitter fallout. And this serenity was quiet enough for the listener to hear Lotus, with each and every track, arranging the lines and forms of his very own personal M.O.

If there are tracks on Reset that adhere to that M.O. they’d be “Massage Situation” and “Bonus Beat,” the former working at inspired variations on one motif and the latter following a heavily modulated loop for 53 seconds. But, see, Reset starts with trip-hop, ends with house, and permits entry to “Vegas Collie,” which sounds like Lotus attempting a more aggressive drum track and backing that with incidental production. “Vegas Collie” is also the only track I’d call a dud, Lotus stretching his style very ably on the others, and perhaps he’s smart to take stabs at diversifying his palette on an EP that functions as his coming out party for Warp Records. Unfortunately, the format simply doesn’t provide enough material for the music to bulk together and congeal, to find continuity in the very procedural amassing of complementary ideas the way that 1983 did. That 34-minute album got to the point, but it also had depth because there was enough of everything coming from slightly different directions to get to the same point. Reset just doesn’t have the total girth for its tracks to rise above the sense that they are song-length snippets previewing a promising LP. A once complete aesthetic now seems refracted because the view here is small and kaleidoscopic, and it’s traded a few of its qualities for something else.

Where before Flying Lotus steadily and evenly pressured his production’s constituents until they melted down and then flowed viscously, on a song like “Spicy Sammich” he leans a bit towards gritty block arrangement. There’s more evidence of a minute paradigm shift in the crisp bass tones and strobing shaker on “Dance Floor Stalker”; at times Reset finds Flying Lotus sounding less like a unique hip-hop producer influenced by minimal electronica and more like a staple if talented Warp producer who happens to be influenced by hip-hop (and a handful of other genres). I don’t know if I can pin that down as a definite negative, but I do think there’s a sense of loss in the labelification, no matter how slight, of an artist whose voice proved as subtly distinct as it did on an album like 1983. I’m not pointing fingers at Warp here and I don’t blame Lotus for trying to find a niche, to connect with more people through tinkering with his self-definition so that it ends up including a few more recognized tropes. But sometimes to do that best you can’t “reset,” you just have to find a way of getting to the next level of the game you’re already playing.