You're Dead!
A sonic collage artist with a great sense of flow, Flying Lotus (real name Steven Ellison) is the king of instrumental hip-hop. *You’re Dead*, a shape-shifting album with a sense of story, is best listened to from beginning to end. Virtuoso electric bassist and vocalist Thundercat cowrote several tracks. Pianist Herbie Hancock, rappers Kendrick Lamar and Snoop Dogg, violinist/arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, singer Angel Deradoorian (who’s worked with The Dirty Projectors), and others also contribute to this expansive effort. Jazz, prog-rock, fusion, funk, and other elements are bent and stretched; the intriguing result dissolves genre borders.
Flying Lotus' fifth album has the stated theme of the one thing every single human has in common, and just about every conceivable style of music is prone to address: the inevitability and condition of death, and how mysterious it really is. Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, and others contribute.
When Flying Lotus says You’re Dead!, he apparently means it. On “Never Catch Me,” off the musician’s new record, Kendrick Lamar raps as if in mid-rapture, tugged heavenward but clinging to earth with almost Biblical language: “And I can sing song and I can unite with you that I love, you that I like.” Rapping as…
The Los Angeles beatsmith shows just how far he's come in a record completely surpassing his others in both effort and achievement.
There isn’t a moment’s peace, and there isn’t a single second where things threaten to calm down.
An early form of You're Dead! was the length of a double album -- a large mass of brief tracks that, for Steven Ellison, possibly signified nothing more than his fifth Flying Lotus album. As the producer and keyboardist spent more time absorbing and shaping the recordings, the title, initially comic in meaning, gained emotional weight while he was provoked to consider his mortality and the losses he has been dealt, including the deaths of his father and mother, his grandmother, his great aunt Alice Coltrane, and creative collaborator Austin Peralta. The completed You're Dead! consists of 19 tracks averaging two minutes in length that are intended to be heard in sequence from front to back. Its flow is even more liquid than that of Until the Quiet Comes, though the sounds are more jagged and free, with roots deeper in jazz. Ellison once again works extensively beside longtime comrades and pulls new collaborators into his sphere. All of them -- bassist and vocalist Thundercat, drummer Deantoni Parks, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, and many others worthy of mention -- help him push jazz, R&B, rap, and electronic music forward at once.
You spend most of a certain fellow Warp producer’s exile gaining a rep as one of the most forward-thinking producers around, nipping off for a quick side project after several critically-renowned releases; Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar guest on your grand return as proof of how far you’ve come, only for one listless blimp over London to divert attention back to the other guy. Richard D James, you shitter.
"If all the great jazz guys heard most of the shit out right now or in the last 20 years, they'd be really disappointed," Flying Lotus recently opined in an Exclaim! interview bemoaning the fact that modern jazz artists just "aren't trying to take it further" anymore.
Steve Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus, makes music that sounds like a melodic car crash. Each song finds jazz, hip-hop, R&B, forward-thinking electronica, and pop smashing together, but what should sound like chaos ends up (most of the time) as a co
Album review: Flying Lotus - You're Dead!. LA favourite realises some seriously bitching beats on album five…
Steven Ellison weaves together hip-hop, psychedelia and experimental jazz in a remix of the Book of the Dead, writes <strong>Theo Leanse</strong>
A conceptual stew of spellbinding electro-noir, You’re Dead is Flying Lotus’s most transcendent work to date.
Flying Lotus' new album 'Your Dead!' reviewed by Northern Transmissions, the LP comes out October 6th on Warp records, the lead single is "Chasing Apples"
Flying Lotus has long seemed to be aiming for some kind of new musical paradigm, and here he might well have found it, writes <strong>Paul MacInnes</strong>