It is impossible to put Flying Lotus, Steven Ellison’s electronic musician stage name, and his upcoming album, “You’re Dead!,” under one genre.
Jazz-inspired with elements of hip-hop, “You’re Dead!” is a psychedelic electronic album that could only be described as a spiritual journey reminiscent of the psychedelic rock of the ’60s repackaged for the listeners of today.
“You’re Dead!” contains a hefty 19 tracks that all reflect the morbid subject matter of the title. The album is like a journey that guides the listener through a succession of Flying Lotus’ idea of the phases of afterlife and death.
“Theme,” the first track, sets up the spiritual and psychedelic tone that remains prevalent throughout the next 18 songs. Falling just under a minute and 30 seconds, the purely instrumental song starts out loud and increases into a psychedelic crescendo and eases into a saxophone solo until surging into a chaotic crash of jazz instruments. The song ebbs and flows like ocean waves.
The tracks then fully descend into morbidity with “Cold Dead” and “Fkn Dead” by featuring ominous elements, including high-pitched female vocalizations. Both songs, with their pounding beats and harsh guitar, depict the slow plunge from death into the afterlife.
One of the few songs with actual lyrics, “Never Catch Me” features Kendrick Lamar backed by Nujabes-inspired jazz and hip-hop instrumental and beats. The reverberations surrounding Lamar’s rapping gives the song an ethereal feel, while psychedelic intermissions that randomly interject into the song evokes the feeling of being suspended in an empty space between life and death.
“Life and death is no mystery and I wanna taste it/ Step inside of my mind and you’ll find curiosity, animosity,” Lamar raps.
The album then makes a turn towards the eerie with “Dead Man’s Tetris,” which features Captain Murphy and Snoop Dogg. Evil laughs, monotonous rapping and the use of reverb on the vocals evoke the morbidity of the lyrics.
“You can’t run, just gonna get you/ I was live when I met you/ Now this seems to upset you/ This what the shit gon‘ get you: Death,” Snoop Dogg raps.
Besides the previous two tracks, most of the songs in the album are instrumentals and undulate between relaxing and creepy. Ebbing from the morbidity of “Dead Man’s Tetris,” tracks like “Coronus, the Terminator” and “Siren Song” feature soothing and spiritual instrumentals that reflect the ambient and spiritual music in “Theme.”
“Turtles” continues the theme of zen music but slowly builds it up to a light beat that is both meditative and relaxing. Flying Lotus’ music is like a continuous stream with every succeeding song carrying at least one element from the previous track. “Turtles” changes the tone by returning to eerie elements, as if to remind the listener that some of the album’s songs, though they are relaxing, carry the macabre theme of death.
The album reaches its low point in the last third of the track list with its continued use of bone-chilling elements in subsequent tracks such as “The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep.” These unpleasant instrumentals become stale and overused, making it a chore to continue listening to the album.
Flying Lotus then redeems himself at the album’s penultimate song, “Your Potential/The Beyond.” The track features Niki Randa’s soft and soothing vocals and removes the overused eerie tone. The mixture of zen music and alien sounds creates the feeling of being in a spiritual state that’s outside of the world. Like the title suggests, the song is like a snapshot of nirvana and conveys the highest potential phase of the afterlife that one could reach.
Flying Lotus’ ability to depict the afterlife without using a lot of lyrics makes this album worth a listen, and his genius shines clearly through his ability to mix radically different genres like jazz and spiritual zen music.
However, the hefty amount of songs on the album, though they mostly fall within the range of one to two minutes, makes it difficult for any of the songs to stick. Each is like a puzzle piece, and when the songs are listened to separately, they seem incomplete and almost forgettable.
– Christina Vo