During the late-2000s heyday of the Los Angeles beat scene, artists pushed sound in ways that frequently suggested hyperbolic visions of distance: We were somehow traveling into space and exploring new dimensions when we listened to Flying Lotus or Nosaj Thing. Yet despite his origins in that circle, Matthew David McQueen, who makes music as Matthewdavid, has always preferred to operate on a more intimate, subconscious level, bathing his audience in hallucinatory collages instead of presenting defined set pieces.
His discography zigzags between experimental instrumentals (his 2011 debut, Outmind), semi-traditional R&B throwbacks (2014’s middling In My World), and weightless new age, all generally tied together by a coating of ambient gloss. Matthewdavid fully dove into that aesthetic with 2016’s Trust the Guide and Glide, a 90-minute Om of an album. Time Flying Beats is yet another left turn, stripping away the clouds that surrounded much of his past work in favor of lucid, brisk production. For an artist whose best ideas too often feel like they’ve been diluted, it’s a welcome switch-up.
There’s a twisted familiarity to much of this album, like finding your family covered in ectoplasm. The first full track “Time Flying” stretches Roland Orzabal’s lovelorn croon from “Head Over Heels” into a drowned howl, meshing it with footwork drum twitches. “Flow With the Go” is a star-stepping fete that sounds like it’s emerged from Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma asterism, while the clean, summery guitars on “Yearns Out” gesture toward a reality where Matthewdavid is a reliable pop producer. For all his headiness, Matthewdavid reminds us throughout the album that he’s adroit at composing missives for the body.
His most beat-driven work can make it feel like he’s moving too fast to bother smoothly threading his influences together. Instead, they bleed into each other, at times colliding in ways that blur the difference between a progressive experiment and a rough draft. A majority of the tracks on Time Flying Beats end within two minutes, with stop-and-reset transitions that make the tracklist all but interchangeable. The anthemic “Ode to Low End,” which takes its name from the Wednesday club night in L.A. where Matthewdavid and his beat scene contemporaries flourished, is followed suddenly by the bleary “Millennial Midnight.” The tracks are lean enough to give his ideas an accessible clarity, and they keep the album’s pacing off-balance enough to maintain Matthewdavid’s psychedelic edge.
This fragmented approach can make for exciting listening, even if Time Flying Beats doesn’t commit to it all the way through. The album’s momentum downshifts abruptly with “Into the Night,” which submerges the sampled cries of the Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmit, from an obscure solo cut of the same name, within a malfunctioning key riff. “Desert Moon” is a disorienting mix of percussive stomps and bells that never bothers to develop into a listenable song, and the nearly seven-minute “Secret Rooms of Tokyo” settles into a melody that runs about five minutes too long, even when an accelerated drum-and-bass rhythm intrudes. Even so, these relatively minor missteps don’t undo the preceding thrills yielded by Matthewdavid’s move to de-emphasize the third eye. Out-of-body trips are fun, but sometimes, the tangible hits just as hard.
