Review: Flying Lotus - You're Dead!
By Jordan Matthiass, Contributor
[Warp; 2014]
Rating: 9/10
Key Tracks: “Dead Man’s Tetris,” “Never Catch Me, “Moment of Hesitation”
You’re Dead! Dead? Wait, what? Who’s dead?
Flying Lotus, aka FlyLo, aka Captain Murphy, aka Stephen Ellison, has been killed. His soul is ascending. Celestial horns are resounding off the lightbeam walls of infinity. Angels are singing.
Old school jazz snares are sounding? Is that a clarinet? What are these glitchy blastbeats doing here? WHERE ARE WE?
So incredibly foreign is the composition of You’re Dead! that it almost defies the label of “album” in the popular sense. It’s no novelty, but the experience of crossing over into the afterlife on FlyLo’s terms is certainly novel. Nothing in modern music, save for the somewhat-popular experimentalism of fellow mad scientist Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), really equates to the foot-tapping incomprehensibility emanated by the free jazz cerebralness of Lotus’ creative output.
Let’s digress. Direct comparisons can be drawn to FlyLo’s previous two albums, 2010’s Cosmogramma and 2012’s Until the Quiet Comes, which, respectively, were forays into the lofty and intellectual themes of deep space and dreams. In the context of these LPs, You’re Dead! is not a comfortable middle, but instead a self-aware blend of the best parts of both of these records.
Whereas Cosmogramma could be incredibly harsh and top-heavy at points (think Venetian Snares) and Until the Quiet Comes could put someone to sleep with its consistently trancelike tone (think Aphex Twin’s ambient), You’re Dead! sees FlyLo using incredibly complex beats as well as free jazz instrumentation and applying these to the thematically peaceful concept of wandering through the afterworld.
On You’re Dead!, one finds start-stop jaunts into death, most coming to conclusion within two minutes. 19 tracks fit on a running time of just under 40 minutes! Unsurprisingly, it is the infrequently-utilized longer tracks which stand out from the pack.
One such song is the insanely interesting “Never Catch Me,” which features Album-of-the-Year-as-Determined-by-Everyone award-winner Kendrick Lamar spitting ridiculous verse over beats that can only be described as “the most radio-friendly Lotus will allow himself to go.” After some derailment into too-smart-for-a-single instrumentalism, Lamar leaves the stage so FlyLo can jump back into the driver’s seat and steer this album into dreamlike territory again.
Directly following “Never Catch Me” is the best cut from You’re Dead!, “Dead Man’s Tetris.” Weirdly enough, this one ditches jazz almost completely to reign in the experimentalism and expound upon this record’s hip-hop smarts. Flying Lotus’ rapping alter-ego Captain Murphy tells the story of how he came to catch a bullet to the head and “blow some trees” with dead musicians J Dilla and Freddie Mercury. The best part of this one: Snoop Dogg sing-talking about the finality of death. It’s just as glorious as it sounds.
“Moment of Hesitation,” one of the many short pieces comprising You’re Dead!, notably features Herbie Hancock. Yes, THE Herbie Hancock. The original post-bop kingpin brings his unique take on rhythm to the album both here and on “Tesla,” two of the jazziest, sexiest, most forward-thinking cuts from this release.
There’s a lot of mystique to the ephemeral jazz-hop of experimentalist Ellison’s newest opus. Nothing about this album really makes sense under scrutiny, but on the whole, the absurd fusion of genres that FlyLo so masterfully blends to create his vision of life after death gel perfectly to create one of the year’s best albums.
