Album Reviews

FlylIFE

A Different View

SOUNDCLOUD.COM/FLYLIFEDMON3YY

“C ause who the fuck gon’ save your family if it isn’t you?” raps FlyLife on the title track from his recently released album. “I know it’s usually guns and drugs but this a different view.” The song serves as the culmination of a broader idea, each prior track helping to redefine a concept of what it means to be successful. Throughout the release, the Des Moines-based MC does this by addressing cultural archetypes and challenging the proliferation of stereotypes in his own life—a contrast which speaks to the promise behind the album’s title.

Despite being deeply personal, A Different View incorporates features and production from a dozen collaborators, including Teller Bank$, Juliano Dock and other members of FlyLife’s Us Vs Them collective. There’s no shortage of lyrical boasting and one-upmanship, but it more closely reflects a rising tide outlook than a crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. This theme echoes through Dominic Harrington’s verse in the methodical stomper, “Enormous,” where he adds, “They don’t want me to win, they hopin’ I catch a big L / They see my potential and wanna do me like Big L.” It makes you wonder what could have been for the New York MC if he hadn’t been gunned down at the age of 24.

Several tracks depict gun violence and drug running as vehicles some use to try to escape their situation. But leveraging those themes to communicate a story reveals a vulnerability in the style: potentially reinforcing negative stereotypes by poetically incorporating them. This problematic trade-off is understood, as FlyLife raps on “Seven Days”: “They wanna put us all in a box and see us on Fox.” This isn’t to overlook the album’s musical cohesion—it incorporates everything from trap to R&B and shines through on several tracks produced by Cartier Cookin’, including “Oceans Thirteen.” But its selfaware concepts resonate as much as its sounds do.

Much of the album goes on to challenge other concepts relating to achievement, with FlyLife attempting to reconcile desires for financial and material gain, companionship and personal satisfaction with society’s conflicting messaging. In “Enormous,” for example, he and Harrington trade bars, referencing Jay-Z and Michael Jordan as childhood heroes while FlyLife later criticizes certain ideological blueprints laid out by past generations. In “A Different View” he raps, “I ain’t respect your ways but I know you ain’t to blame / You OGs dropped the ball, truthfully them n____s lame.”

While not a direct reference to the aforementioned icons, this line provides an interesting point of contrast to their position as sources of inspiration. In a way, it recognizes society’s use of “successful” outliers to weaponize idealistic versions of Black masculinity in undermining and dismissing certain realities facing those stuck within generational cycles of struggle. How does someone pull themselves up by their own bootstraps like Jay or MJ when they don’t even have boots? The close of the album brings with it no specific view of what success is, but instead, FlyLife encourages the idea that success is what you make it, depending on your own context. Each listener needs to determine what that means for themself. Therein resides the different view at the heart of this release. —Chris DeLine

WIllIAM J lOCKER

BRAINWASH WILLIAMJLOCKER.BANDCAMP.COM

Those of us of a certain age who spent any time on the rave or club scenes during their heyday are familiar with that distinct sensation of coming out the other side of a night of partying, with the sun starting to rise and the DJ lifting the music along with it to something bright and effusive. Maybe you’re rolling, maybe you’re tripping; maybe you’re riding the inevitable high of a night spent dancing with reckless abandon. But has the sun ever felt like this? You’re sweaty and hot from THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF lyRICAl BOASTING AND ONE-UPMANSHIP, BUT IT MORE ClOSEly REFlECTS A RISING TIDE OUTlOOK THAN A CRABS-IN-A-BUCKET MENTAlITy. giving your all on the floor, but this rising sun on your face imbues a different kind of warmth. You feel awake, maybe even hopeful. Just existing is the greatest thing you can imagine. William J. Locker’s newest album, BRAINWASH, hits those same notes. Opening track “Flow” is a dancepop banger, guaranteed to drag you to your feet. Its dense layering is like a dance floor in miniature, with disparate lines weaving in and out and something new to listen to on each repeat.

“Flow” rises and rises with no release into “Free My Mind,” which lands heavier but with no less urgency. “No longer alone on this megaphone / Get outside, feel the love, you’re alive / I’m gonna free my mind,” Locker sings. It’s a manifesto and call to action in one, adamantly positive and delightfully rocking.

He flips listener expectations again with the bluesy “Walkin On” at track three. Locker has a Scissor Sisters-esque ability to genre surf while still keeping the energy up (complete with Jake Shears’ vocal flexibility, sounding good doing it all).

The silky-voiced Nella Thomas guests on track six, “Good Thing Goin’.” The sunny early ‘60s vibe is pure joy, right through the sounds of the surf in the outro.

The title track pulls things back into a more traditional dance vibe. Wordless vocals emphasize the steady pulse, and the simple, repetitive melody is deconstructed by a dozen different kinds of sound.

“I love you more than I can hide,” Locker sings on the ‘70s rocker “Young,” a genre smash that seems to ask the musical question, “What if Tom Petty had given glam a try?” Love is persistent through this album, and Locker wants the listener to not just know it, but share it.

Things slow down with “Infinite,” a thoughtful instrumental that exemplifies wistfulness, a last indulgence of memory, perhaps. An echo of happiness.

Then track 12, “Hear My Name,” closes things out on a slightly different note, with an energy that extends from defiance rather than joy. But it’s no less open-eyed and engaging.

BRAINWASH would be one hell of an album to see performed live. If Locker has a fraction of the energy on stage that he pours into these recordings, the audience would be brainwashed indeed, swept into a communal experience of activated love and joy.