Listening to “Everything Is Your Fault”, which anchors the third album by the wife-and-husband team of Julie and Buddy Miller, is a little like listening in on a late-night argument. It opens with a gently picked acoustic guitar theme, but very quickly hardens and sours. A tambourine rattles in the background like the chains of a ghost and Buddy strangles notes out of his electric guitar, while Julie, who wrote the song, airs her grievances with unsettling directness: “You talk through me, not to me,” she accuses, then adds, “It’s so dehumanising.” On the chorus she comes up with the ultimate argument ender when she sings, “Everything is your fault, 
in the whole wide world.”

One of the most eagerly anticipated Americana albums of the year, Breakdown On 20th Ave South sounds like it was born out of frustration and distance rather than harmony and union. In the 10 years since their last record – 2009’s Written In Chalk – Buddy has become an extremely busy producer, collaborator, sideman, and 
even ship captain. In addition to tours with Jim Lauderdale, Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant, he has served as music supervisor on the TV show Nashville and hosted the Cayamo Cruise for Americana artists and fans, with stops in St Maarten and Tortola. Julie – herself a deft singer-songwriter with six solo albums to her name – spent most of the past 10 years at their home in Nashville, dealing with assorted medical issues.

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In his absence, she wrote songs. Lots of them. Most were raw-nerved and even confrontational, as she waited for her husband to set aside the time to make another record with her, to follow up Written In Chalk. The couple recorded at home, playing almost all the instruments and hiring various drummers to sit in for a song or two. That alarming title suggests these songs are anchored in one place; they’re about her experiences at home rather than his experiences on the road. Julie emerges on Breakdown as the main creative agent, not only writing every song but singing lead on almost all of them and reportedly dictating the low-key, lowdown sound of the record. Buddy maintains his role as a sideman, helping to amplify her weariness even when it’s directed at him.

Written In Chalk was full of odes to impermanence, stark meditations on departure and death, and their voices blended together with a sense of collective mourning. Breakdown is somehow darker, exploring the destructive effects of love and commitment: how marriage might raise you up and drag you down, how it maims as easily as it heals. “Love will tangle up your thoughts,” they sing together on “Spittin’ On Fire”, about desire gone feral. “The heart won’t be denied, even when the lips you kissed are the lips that lied.” It’s always presumptuous to read too much autobiography into songs, but that’s a hell of a line to sing to each other.

Buddy, of course, is not the villain of the album, but someone similarly caught up in this storm of love and desire. He’s a sympathetic guitar player, his crisp picking underscoring rather than undercutting the sentiments in Julie’s songs. More crucially, as a producer for Richard Thompson, the Carolina Chocolate Drops and bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, he specialises in homey-sounding records that try to erase the distance between artist and audience. Breakdown is similarly intimate – just two people making music together – even if the songs are meant to sound a little prickly, as though they might scratch you if you listen too closely. They only stumble when they look beyond themselves for inspiration: with its martial drums and strident pace, “War Child”, about the refugee crisis, sounds melodramatic more than outraged, and “Thoughts At 2 AM” defers to Dylan in how it addresses the times.

And yet, even on those two missteps, their voices just sound so good together: hers reedy and expressive, yet more guttural here than on Written In Chalk; his clear and high, somehow less grainy as he ages. Maybe that’s why this album ultimately sounds so generous and compassionate despite the many tensions it voices. It’s not about how a relationship falls apart, but how it holds together even in the toughest of times. That makes the sweet, hymnlike love song “Til The Stardust Comes Apart” sound like the album’s beating heart, its simple sentiments all the more powerful for being so hard won. “Our road may grow too hard with sorrow all around,” Julie and Buddy sing together, “but in each other’s arms we lay our burdens down.”

The August 2019 issue of Uncut is on sale from June 13, and available to order online now – with Bruce Springsteen on the cover. Inside, you’ll find The Rolling Stones, The Raconteurs, Woodstock, Black Sabbath, Beak>, Doves, Jimmy Cliff, Billy Childish, the Flamingo Club and more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including The Black Keys, 75 Dollar Bill, House And Land, Trash Kit, Mega Bog and more.

Four years have passed since Flying Lotus’s last album, You’re Dead!, the LA producer’s goofy rumination on the cosmic finality of things, and in that time Steven Ellison 
has busied himself with a stack of projects. He produced for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly and Thundercat’s Drunk and last year celebrated the tenth anniversary of his record label, Brainfeeder, an imprint very much in his own image that’s mapping tasteful new territory between jazz, hip-hop, soul and electronica.

He’s pursued his interest in film, composing the soundtrack to sci-fi thriller Perfect, released this month, and in 2017 his directorial debut, Kuso, came out to mixed reviews. A grotesque body-horror black comedy packed with genuinely disturbing scatological scenes – audience members walked out of festival screenings – it was called “the grossest film ever made” by The Guardian and its Rotten Tomatoes rating is 33 per cent. But, gonzo or not, at least it proved that Ellison was serious about filmmaking and that his cinematic vision, a term readily applied to his music, notably his 2010 breakthrough, Cosmogramma, could be expressed with 
a movie camera.

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By extension, given their LA milieu, 
it’s not a surprise to find David Lynch, 
a key influence on Ellison, making a cameo on “Fire Is Coming”, Flamagra’s lead track. “Fire is coming,” he warns, dressed as a wolf in its video, “fire is coming.” Ellison suggests that this album is “a lingering concept about fire, an eternal flame sitting on a hill”, and for all its existential allusions – George Clinton, who starred in Kuso, appears on a fine stomp called “Burning Down The House”, while flames crackle at the album’s beginning and end – you might reason that the terrible fires that ravage great swathes of California every summer 
in recent memory must have affected Ellison in some way, too.

In a sense, Flying Lotus might have envisioned each of his albums as a personal movie, had he the skills at the time. His 2006 debut, 1983, referred to the year of his birth; Los Angeles, its follow-up and his first for Warp, explored his home town; and Cosmogramma, his grandest statement so far, attempted to articulate profound universal feelings. On 2012’s Until The Quiet Comes, he dealt with the death of his mother in a classy and restrained manner and then chose to loosen up on You’re Dead, which featured turns by the likes of his pal Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Herbie Hancock and Ellison’s trusty foil Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner.

Like his great aunt Alice Coltrane, Ellison gives the impression he operates on a more spiritual plane, distanced from the vagaries of the industry, and certainly the intent of his recent albums would back this up. What’s curious is that he does 
not necessarily have a signature style 
or a noticeable desire to write a hit. Rather, he’s progressed from the intricate electronics and beat-making that landed him a deal with Warp to becoming something of a producer-cum-band leader, marshalling a Brainfeeder ensemble at his home studio whose members – notably Brandon Coleman, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Thundercat – possess outrageous chops.

And they’re all over Flamagra. Five 
years in the making and consisting of 
27 tracks that tend to segue into one another, if Flamagra were a film it would be messy, chaotic, silly and, in places, deeply moving. It would feel far longer than its 68-minute running time. Originally conceived as a 10-track beats album with zero jazz moments, Ellison had an epiphany last autumn when he realised the album should evoke transcendental sensations and capture childlike feelings of wonder – an intervention triggered, perhaps, by the death of his good friend, the musician Mac Miller, who overdosed in September aged just 26. Calling the album “a refuge for pain”, Ellison dedicates two swirling instrumentals to Miller, “Find Your Own Way Home” and “Thank U Malcolm”.

By looking to present everything he’s been up to, Ellison crams a lot – arguably too much – into Flamagra, assembling a flawed masterpiece that infuriates as often as it dazzles. From oily jazz and dubby IDM to jam-band grinding and rococo piano miniatures, interludes litter the album, stalling any momentum generated by the main cuts. This is a shame because he brings out the best in his all-star guests: Anderson .Paak’s priapic Prince-styled preacher on “More”, rapper Tierra Whack’s spaced-out monologue on the acid-trap of “Yellow Belly”, and Denzel Curry’s magnanimous jousting on “Black Balloons”. These spots take place during Flamagra’s frenetic first half, alongside a so-so Little Dragon collaboration and “All Spies”, a cute cover of the theme tune of ’80s computer game Spy vs Spy.

The Lynch-narrated “Fire Is Coming” ushers in the album’s second movement, whereupon events take a more sombre, dream-like turn. In his rap alias Captain Murphy, Ellison slurs his words on the Oxycontin sigh of “Debbie Is Depressed” and practices piano on “FF4” and “Hot Oct.”, while Thundercat’s “The Climb” 
is a lovely Philly soul-searcher with the line, “As soon as I think I’ve got a grip, 
shit starts to slip.” The apocalypse arrives with “Land Of Honey”, a lush orchestral number featuring Solange singing hallelujahs as the storm builds and 
the fire starts to burn.

Is this fire crackling in the final track “Hot Oct.” meant to evoke the domestic bliss of a smouldering hearth, the mindless destruction of a Californian inferno brought about by climate change, or the flame of hope that burns in us all? Frankly, by this point, you’re just glad you’ve made it to the end of Flamagra. Ellison is clearly in the form of his life, bursting with ideas and innovative 
ways to execute them, and this indulgent audio patchwork is how he has always chosen to communicate. Its moments of brilliance burn bright, but all the smoke obscures the quality.

The August 2019 issue of Uncut is on sale from June 13, and available to order online now – with Bruce Springsteen on the cover. Inside, you’ll find The Rolling Stones, The Raconteurs, Woodstock, Black Sabbath, Beak>, Doves, Jimmy Cliff, Billy Childish, the Flamingo Club and more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including The Black Keys, 75 Dollar Bill, House And Land, Trash Kit, Mega Bog and more.