Best albums of 2014: No 9 - You're Dead! by Flying Lotus

One fact almost always mentioned when someone writes about Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, is that his aunt is astral jazz pioneer Alice Coltrane. That family connection may have led Ellison down a similarly experimental path: in the eight years since his debut album, 1983, he’s melded scattergun breakbeats with abstract noise, using electronica, hip-hop and even jungle as his building blocks. But rarely in that mix would you find him explicitly delving into the world of jazz. That is until You’re Dead!, the first record of Ellison’s to fully engage with the genre.

Originally planned as a straight-up jazz record featuring Ellison alongside fellow Brainfeeder signee Thundercat on bass, it slowly morphed into an even more ambitious, wide-ranging album with guest appearances from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg and Herbie Hancock. This meeting of jazz and hip-hop is what the album excels at exploring, with Lamar’s verse on Never Catch Me sitting on top of what you could safely describe as virtuoso bass playing, plus soaring synths and boom-bap percussion. It’s bold, ambitious and, most importantly, it works.

At times, You’re Dead! is closer to the contemporary jazz of artists such as Robert Glasper, Roller Trio and BadBadNotGood. Take the track Cold Dead, which has no qualms with being essentially a 90-second wig out, replete with guitar shredding, sax meandering and ambient abstraction. Turkey Dog Coma is even more unapologetically jazz, with the skittish first minute making way for multiple breakdowns that seem completely unrelated to what’s come before. The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep is Flying Lotus at his most experimental, with Ellison reanimating his rapping alias Captain Murphy – yet instead of engaging in his trademark verbose delivery, this time he delivers a strained, almost spoken word tale of prescription drugs and lucid dreaming.

Despite such bold sonic exploration, You’re Dead! never feels like a hard listen, in which you have to search hard for genuinely enjoyable moments. Rather, Ellison’s naturally inventive approach unleashes the innate joy within hip-hop and jazz, and does so without dumbing down either.

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