Is there anything headier than a jazz concept album? How is a genre where the same song can evoke wildly different emotions in two different listeners supposed to cohere to a theme?
It’s a tall order, but thatap what electronic soothsayer Stephen Ellison, AKA , attempts to do with his latest brew of electronic, jazz, and now, hip-hop, on a subject most of us push out of our minds until otherwise necessary: death. “You’re Dead!,” Flying Lotus’ fifth LP, explores the end of being with verses, song titles (see: “Cold Dead,” “Fkn Dead”) and a score with the ups and downs and resolution you’d expect from a screenplay.
“You’re Dead!” explores the murky depths that are requisite in a death-fixated album. “The Boys Who Died In Their Sleep,” for example, has Ellison assuming his vocal alter-ego Captain Murphy to illustrate how we cop out of dealing with our existence. But like that cheeky exclamation point pinned to the tail of the title, the record is weighted well against its dour moments. Flurries of blood-pumping fret-and-key work abound, from the likes of Thundercat, Herbie Hancock and Ellison himself, like in “Cold Dead” and “Turkey Dog Coma.” The semi-acoustic “Stirring” is an unexpected pocket of warmth, which makes way for “Coronus, The Terminator,” and a calmative rhythm that finds the album as close to something like peaceful resignation as it gets.
For a direct approach, Flying Lotus sits in the confessional on to expound on The End, from anxiety to inspiration. There’s little room to breathe in the tempo’s high clip, but Lamar is always a stride ahead, and breaks off the album’s best lyrical moments with a symposium-worthy flow: “The sentiment of my nerves that I just persevere / The big thought of fallin’ off disappeared to my fate / They say that heaven’s real.” Snoop Dogg counterbalances Lamar’s wan meditations by laughing in death’s face in “Dead Man’s Tetris,” suggesting a dead man might just be really, really stoned.
Through these massive oscillations in attitude and style, the center holds. “You’re Dead!” concludes with “The Protest,” a psychedelic, drum-driven resolution punctuated with a deceptive end note: “We will live on / forever and ever.” Considering how Ellison has operated on the album to that point (and its ), it doesn’t scan as him simply telling us what we want to hear. Rather, in an album full of uncertainty, this is it leaving us with its most ambiguous sentiment. Is it a challenge? A sardonic warning? A spiritual reassurance? They’re enduring and important questions. Of course, “You’re Dead!” provides no answers. But it broaches them beautifully.
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Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him in Relix magazine and the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
