Final Rating: 9.1/10
Boom! The album starts off with a Goblin-like track that could have been found on the soundtrack to Suspiria (either that or a more humbling rendition of a drone track that would have been on The Seer). It cuts right away into a jazz freak out, and the entire album plays like one long evolving song. It panics at first. It then accepts its fate. It learns to think outside of the confinements of life. Lastly, it all ends for good. The point is that You’re Dead! is a statement on the listening experience. You, the listener, are very much dead, and Flying Lotus has captured that experience in audial form. His challenge, much like something Gaspar Noé was interested in taking on with Enter the Void, was to record the afterlife on record. How does one make a vague depiction of the world after ours without fixating on any particular rendition coloured in by political, religious or spiritual beliefs? Flying Lotus tries his best to paint an open picture on mortality, and the result is an electronic, jazz, hip hop amalgamation of termination.
Steven Ellison, a descendant of Alice and John Coltrane, has performed under Flying Lotus for years now (and has recently started fighting crime under the rapping identity Captain Murphy, of whom makes appearances here), and he has certainly received his share of praises before. Without letting his previous successes squash his followup releases, he has taken on new ground with You’re Dead!. It’s an album that isn’t nearly as lush as Until The Quiet Comes and there isn’t nearly as much experimentation as there is on his opus Cosmogramma. What You’re Dead! has is a voice of reason, whereas his past albums felt much more open to interpretation.
Here, we’re faced with a dilemma. We have died. We have a battling subconscious depicted by dueling genres and many guest appearances. This album sounds like free form jazz but then will lean more towards an electronic concept. Suddenly, we get raging electric guitars. Do we prefer the acoustic drum kits or the constructed digital beats? Death, according to Flying Lotus, is a mishmash of dreams and thoughts that truly don’t have a singular train of thought. If anything, the album itself is so afraid of dying that songs will start immediately as soon as the previous tracks end. With many songs around a minute or two in length, this is a release that is battling against fatality. The album can’t end now! There’s still so much left to cover!
With its own battle of fates, You’re Dead! is still a nice short length. It’s a trip that can be revisited on a whim. It’s pretty enough to warrant fascination, and it’s stern enough to remind you of your mission. It’s abstract enough to truly feel like a brain shutting down and panicking, but it can also represent a soul trying to cling onto the physical body of which it is departing from. It’s a bittersweet album that celebrates the cosmos and the afterlife, yet it also saves time to express its fears. It’s nice that You’re Dead! lacks a specific concept, because it dabbles in so many forms of thought. It is always cohesive, despite its adventurous ways. There is a lot of information to process, and luckily this out-of-body-experience can be revisited. It warrants many returns because, like life, there is enough going on that not all of it will be appreciated in full at first. Once You’re Dead! makes sense, it is a near-visual splendor that will secure you inside its celestial womb much like the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
