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Album Review: Flying Lotus -You're Dead!
RnB/Hip Hop | Friday 10th October 2014 | Katie
Following the ambience of Until the Quiet Comes, Flying Lotus takes his sound deep into the afterlife with this new release. His most conceptually tight album to-date reflects the personal deaths that have hung over the last few years of his life. For Ellison his music is deeply personal and diary like and this dark and restless opus reminds us of that. You're Dead melds the artists two great loves; jazz and hip-hop, teaming up with Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, Herbie Hancock and Kendrick Lamar. His sonic blendings flit between experimental hip-hop and jazz influences.
After the inevitable leak of You're Dead!, Ellison urged listeners to experience the album as a whole, rather than as separate tracks. The narrative and the length of the tracks lend themselves to an immersive, free-flowing listening experience. As a former film student, Ellison is committed to cultivating the visual alongside the auditory. This time round guro manga artist Shinro Kagtao has teamed up with hyper-visualist Strangeloop to create a carnival of psychedelic gore to accompany Ellison's beats.
You're Dead! opens with pregnant sounds of chimes and the expectant sounds of beats to come with "Theme". Exploding into jazz-fuelled skits and frenetic soundgasms that lead into his collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, "You'll Never Catch Me". Lamar's almost Biblical vocals are fuelled with the same urgency of Ellison's drum beat that moves between the melodic and the prophetic.This is captured perfectly in Hiro Murai's music video. Filming two children lindy-hopping out of their own funeral Murai captures the joyful juxtaposition of death and the idea of eternity.
His next track "Dead Man's Tetris", featuring Captain Murphy (Ellison's rap alter ego) and Snoop Dogg has a bouncy 8-bit instrumental and a lyrical bite. The sound of the album takes an instrumental trip that feels like a journey into the galaxies and astral planes that Ellison has referred to in earlier work. "Coronus The Terminator" breaks the mould with Flying Lotus' and Niki Randa's symphonic vocals but it is "Siren Song" that marks the apex of the journey; it is almost an ascension.
Changing path again, "Ready err Not" has a blippy, sinister vibe that Ellison called his "mischief song". This highly-strung energy continues on his track with Thundercat, “Decent into Madness”. Conjuring Sci-Fi visions and wide-eyed fantasies. This track is reminiscent of the psychedelic boat trip in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, mesmerising and slightly unsettling.
Recently Ellison revealed that there is another version of the track "Obligatory Cadence", on which he says he is 'singing about a dream I once had about a deity who took me into the clouds and showed me a world without darkness'. This idea of an eternity is further reiterated in his closing track "The Protest". A reminder that there is something of us all that will never die. A statement made true by the genius of FlyLo's beats.
Check out Flying Lotus' Twitter here- https://twitter.com/flyinglotus
And his website here- http://flying-lotus.com/youre-dead/
