"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. On his new album, he's righting those perceived wrongs.
You're Dead! is "post-jazz" in the same way that Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life was post-hardcore; it revels in the historical timbres and tropes of the genre while borrowing modern sounds from other musical styles, which in Flying Lotus' case means the experimental hip-hop/electronic sounds that defined works like Cosmogramma and Until the Quiet Comes.
An uninterrupted, four-song opening suite of lightning-fast guitar-plucking, brushed snare and rubbery bass — punctuated on "Cold Dead" by fuzz guitar — leads into Kendrick Lamar's urgent verses on the incredible "Never Catch Me" and then a funked-up take from Snoop Dogg and Lotus himself (as alter-ego Captain Murphy) on "Dead Man's Tetris." But the guests — even Snoop and former Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian — never feel forced, partly because of the album's sonic sprawl and partly because of Lotus' ability to weave them seamlessly into the album's cosmic journey.
Excitingly new yet classically evocative, You're Dead! is contemplative but never boring, an example of genre cross-pollination that transcends novelty and, occasionally, time and space as well.
(Warp)You're Dead! is "post-jazz" in the same way that Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life was post-hardcore; it revels in the historical timbres and tropes of the genre while borrowing modern sounds from other musical styles, which in Flying Lotus' case means the experimental hip-hop/electronic sounds that defined works like Cosmogramma and Until the Quiet Comes.
An uninterrupted, four-song opening suite of lightning-fast guitar-plucking, brushed snare and rubbery bass — punctuated on "Cold Dead" by fuzz guitar — leads into Kendrick Lamar's urgent verses on the incredible "Never Catch Me" and then a funked-up take from Snoop Dogg and Lotus himself (as alter-ego Captain Murphy) on "Dead Man's Tetris." But the guests — even Snoop and former Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian — never feel forced, partly because of the album's sonic sprawl and partly because of Lotus' ability to weave them seamlessly into the album's cosmic journey.
Excitingly new yet classically evocative, You're Dead! is contemplative but never boring, an example of genre cross-pollination that transcends novelty and, occasionally, time and space as well.
