Cool to be Prog - 'You're Dead!' by Flying Lotus

Ai Caramba! You know that the stigma – in some “cool” music journalist circles at least – associated with the musical genre termed “progressive rock” has finally been exorcised when one of the icons of hip-hop/jazz cool can release – get this – a concept album, with a psychedelic art cover, intended to be listened to as a single piece of music (all 38-odd minutes of it) and it be lauded across a broad spectrum of the music press. I present to you ‘You’re Dead!’ by Los Angeles jazz/fusion electro-hip-hop maverick Flying Lotus (real name Steven Ellison).

Make no mistake ‘You’re Dead!’ is as unashamedly prog an album as you are likely to find anywhere this year.  It may be a jazz/fusion hip-hop psych album but prog it most certainly is. Like all musical genres – and prog is an incredibly broad genre – the music stands or falls on its own.

So the question is, is ‘You’re Dead!’ any good? For starters, that’s a question for you to answer – after all one man’s meat is another man’s poisson. Well, I rather like it – at times it reminds me of a cross between Soft Machine of the ‘Third’ era and Hatfield and The North without the so-beautifully-English vocals of Richard Sinclair with a dash of early Weather Report.

It has a tension at the heart of the music – on the one hand I love it’s restlessness but on the other hand some of the best tunes are gone before they’ve had a chance to develop, witness, for example,  the sequence ‘Cold Dead’, ‘Fkn Dead’ into ‘Never Catch Me’.

Standouts for me include ‘Turkey Dog Coma’, ‘Siren Song’, ‘Descent into Madness’ and ‘Obligatory Cadence’.

You can hear the full album on Spotify.  I’ve embedded the video for the single ‘Never Catch Me’, less because it’s a favourite (see above) more because it’s there.

'You're Dead!' full album on Spotify...

 

  

Until next time...