Henry St. Pierre
Connector Staff

Steven Ellison, known as Flying Lotus, is a Los Angeles-based experimental musician and producer, and is also a rapper under the stage name Captain Murphy, who appears on this album. It’s difficult to place a genre on “FlyLo” because his sounds transcend one specific label. He’s not just hip-hop, or electronic, or jazz, or even rock – his music is one big delicious concoction of all these sounds.

His fifth studio album is titled “You’re Dead!” and its main theme is, well, death. The album is 19 songs long for a grand total of 38 minutes. You don’t need to be a math major to see that the average song length is two minutes: not exactly a long song.

However, this album isn’t about pointing out particular songs that could be singles; it’s about listening to the album as a full experience. Listening to this album from the beginning, with the rather-creepy “Theme,” to the concluding track “The Protest,” is awesome. It’s short, but hits you hard. It’s easy to feel an aura of death, of afterlife, of general uncertainty surrounding mortality while listening to the crazy drum patterns and jazzy horns. You melt into the music.

There are definitely tracks on this LP that stick out above the rest. Some of my favorites include tracks “Never Catch Me” featuring Kendrick Lamar, “Turkey Dog Coma,” “Tesla,” “Descent Into Madness,” “Dead Man’s Tetris” (you have to love Snoop Dogg) and “Cold Dead.” All these songs enhance the experience so much more and truly reinforce that recurring theme of death, and how the thought of death and the idea of afterlife are so far-out and (quite frankly) trippy.

“You’re Dead!” is a 38-minute album that illustrates emotions that last for eternity. Those emotions are thinking of death and all that it is, all that it isn’t, and possibly even giving a soundtrack that plays in the background while you’re strolling around in Heaven, or Nirvana, or Valhalla, or while you decompose in your grave, or whatever else you believe in.

If you enjoy hip-hop, jazz, rock, classical or if you simply enjoy anything with a rhythm, I’d highly recommend giving this album a listen. You won’t regret spending a little over a half-hour listening to this; however, for the same reason that it is kind of on the short side, I can’t give the album too high of a grade. There are also moments on the album that are more uninteresting than others, but they are usually followed by tracks that make up for their lackluster sound.

Final Grade: A-