Flying Lotus - Yasuke ALBUM REVIEW

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LET FLYLO DO THE BLADE SCORE PLEASE.


I support anything Flying Lotus is involved in. He’s one of my favorite producers of all time, he’s been involved in and has made some of my favorite albums of all time, and he’s really influenced my taste in music. First, let’s give a little context to this project right here. In 2018, Netflix announced that Studio MAPPA, a Japanese animation company behind popular anime like Yuri!!! on Ice, the final season of Attack on Titan, and the upcoming adaptation of popular manga Chainsaw Man, is creating a miniseries for the platform called Yasuke, a story about recorded history’s first black samurai serving under Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga. While there are slightly more fantastical elements in the miniseries, the core story is still there. LaKeith Stanfield voices Yasuke and executive produced the series along with Flying Lotus himself. Flying Lotus also did the score for this project, which is being considered his seventh studio album. Along with frequent collaborators Thundercat and Nikki Randa, Denzel Curry also appears on this project. Enough intro, let’s get into the album.

Funny enough, I finished up my first year of college today, and since my major is film, I’ve really begun to learn more about film scores, and I picked up on a couple of influences here. Vangelis (Blade Runner) really had a lot of influence with a lot of synthesizers throughout the soundtrack. I also think Kenji Kawai (Ring, Ghost in the Shell) has a massive influence on this, with the drums and chimes on this score matching with the feudal Japan aesthetic very well. There are multiple tracks on here that just have me levitating as I listen like “Survivors", "Mind Flight," and "The Eyes Of Vengeance." The show’s theme, “Black Gold” with Thundercat, is absolutely stunning and one of my favorite songs of the year so far, and Denzel Curry’s contributions on “African Samurai” feels like a battle cry. Let’s get to Flying Lotus’s work, though. This feels very folklorish. If you were to close your eyes while listening to this, this music would help visualize the story unfolding in your mind about Yasuke. It legitimately feels like you’re being transported to a faraway land, and that’s nothing new for FlyLo.

I gotta admit, I’m pretty blown away by this. The existence of this album is a dream come true to me. Yasuke combines the best elements of Flying Lotus’s signature fusion of jazz, electronic, and hip-hop with a feudal Japan influence and a film score tinge to create what genuinely might be one of FlyLo’s best projects yet. Since he’s one of my favorite producers, this is no small feat. Thank you for the amazing project.


10/10


Listen here

YouTube Music




Yasuke is a Brainfeeder release.

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