Triphop is supposed to have died a long time ago, right? Then why does 2008 seem so much like 1995, lately?

Portishead put out an album that undercuts their own legend and simultaneously bolsters it even further; there's a "comeback" in the works by Tricky (don't hold your breath); and now we have a second full album by Steven Ellison—Alice Coltrane's great-nephew, Cartoon Network scorer, and the man behind the Flying Lotus moniker—that a label like Cup of Tea or Mo' Wax or Ninja Tune would have given up their collected Sugarhill 12-inches to release back in the day. But Los Angeles isn't typical triphop at allthe beats scuttle rather than loop in a funky haze, there aren't very many vocals to latch onto, and jazzy hooks are nowhere to be heard. Instead, Los Angeles is one of the slipperiest albums of the yearand one of the most engrossing.

Ellison excels equally at building backing tracks that you've never quite heard before—from the vibrating industrialscape of "GNG BNG" to the dusted futurist-soul of "Roberta Flack"—and at filling them with touches you aren't quite expecting, like the dirty sitar run that pops up about a minute into the former song or the latter's wondrous envelope filter coda. That filter solo works by taking in whatever sounds Ellison feeds it and then whooshing them about like a seashell covering an ear, disorienting and reorienting everything, transforming it all in the process. That's not too different from the way Los Angeles itself works, either.