Fliptrix: Dragonfly.
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Brighton-based Fliptrix, Mr Whitehead to his friends, label boss, Entrepreneur and quarter of The Four Owls, is back with his 10th album, not including the masses of others’ work he has been involved with. Backed on production duties by Leaf Dog and Illinformed, has he spread himself too thin? MK Bennett has some thoughts.
UK Hip-Hop is so vastly undervalued it almost defies comprehension. Apart from the very occasional mention in the important papers, it exists to keep the hive minds of its followers alive, while ever expanding and evolving to keep up with its own very busy culture. The more successful stories tend to be amalgamations of styles, whether Roots Manuva’s heavy nod to Reggae and Dub or the many who move to Grime, sick of playing in half-empty pub backrooms and knowing the rent needs to be paid.
Fliptrix, artist and label boss at the much respected High Focus, has a vision and a way to do his own thing. This album, in particular, comes within a rarefied lineage, the artist’s realisation that he is not bulletproof and that far more banal realities will rip his heart out, and his attempt to make sense of that, the transference to sound, to audio, is what he must present to us, vulnerabilities, raw nerve endings and all.
The album is thematically linked as a response to the passing of his father, so it is elegiac in tone, with minor key chord progressions and other instruments, other samples, symbolising meaning and metaphor. There’s also the question of whether he can separate his pain from his need to entertain. However, the family is one of the very few subjects that the gatekeepers of hip-hop will allow with sincerity intact and one of its biggest outliers in terms of crossover appeal.
Produced variously by the Leigh Brothers, Leaf Dog and Illinformed, and recorded in solitude in the Portuguese mountains, the album starts with Striving, a beatless introductory song, a tale of the breadline, with an acoustic guitar that is not tonally or, you suspect, accidentally, a million miles away from Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, not a bad reference so early on and a nice subtle start to proceedings. Forever, with its stuttering on/off beat and Eastern backing is not dissimilar, like a good percentage of the album, to RZA’s production with and outside the Wu-Tang, especially the criminally underrated Killah Priest album Heavy Mental.
Keep Going On, with its deep two note bass line and self-explanatory lyrics, folklike and Spacek adjacent guitar figure, and nagging, insistent beat tapping you on the skull, while Fliptrix details a narrative of mental fortitude that is a lesson in producing music to fit words to. Dragonfly Steeze, where they are joined by Jazz T on the cuts, a big figure in the bigger story of Fliptrix and High Focus, is the first half highpoint, not that it ever drops below brilliance anyway, Reminiscent of Madlib or Nujabes via the English South Coast, it has a backline that far outweighs the glottal limitations of the natural accents on display, with some of the influence of the work that DJ Premier did with The Four Owls. These drums kick hard.
See It In The Clouds continues what is, in effect, a concept album, a narrative of regret and repressed emotion with the relevant mood music saying what he cannot or will not, the repeated motif acting as the silver lining leaving the clouds, a glimpse of memory, a discovered country where nothing changes. Make It Rain is an almost Trad. Art tune from the golden years when Ghostface made songs about his mom that sold millions, it’s a poignant and elegant and criminally short song, as if they couldn’t bear the beauty, the blues, of the sample any longer than they did.
Funky Microphone is an upbeat yet melancholy song, the one-second piano riff elevating this built for the stage banger upwards and out of its comfort zone. Cosmic Scenes featuring Greantea Peng is another future classic, propelled by a delightful brass line while the vocals add a different dimension, and it suddenly stops as if a better idea had just struck him. Spooky Times has a Jazz thing, the brass sitting in with the vocal to accentuate rather than repeat or lift, the stretch and pull seeming to soundtrack the story like Bacall taunting Bogart.
The Glow is another song with a perfect sample/riff, an almost Mexican horn blowing you toward the party, and Paradoxical, with its deep cello and piano, seems mournful, but the juxtaposition with the more vibrant vocal melody keeps its head above the trenches and Making Waves is two minutes and ten seconds of bass and flute based excellence as the rhythm draws a picture of two fighters forever circling each other.
Other than its stand-alone, authentic work of deep personal conviction and sonic genius, this album is set apart from many others because it’s not just a series of unfunny skits and some singles, it’s a presentable piece of art with intention and poise. It just means more.
Grapevine knows the time is nearly up, and the song is nearly sung as it eases itself slowly toward the exit, the infectious bassline hopping around like a wounded animal, boats called in from the lake. So, to Dragonfly itself. A slow classical piece of musical and lyrical symbolism as he urges the Dragonfly to fly, a Miles Davis level trumpet mourns the dead, the procession walking in step behind. It is a brave and vulnerable way to end an album, a showstopper.
Is this, also his 10th record, his Magnum Opus, his Only Built For Cuban Linx, his Liquid Swords? With this musical scope, the wide-screen storytelling, the integrity, the insistence of narrative and insistence on narrative, it just might be. It is certainly the best Hip Hop album to come out of these Isles for a long time.
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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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