In a world where every artist strives to be different on one level or another, K.Flay still manages to stand out from the pack. Her YouTube channel is filled with video reviews of her favorite books, and while it's clear she's got her sonic branding on lock, she's not afraid to embrace the type of personal transparency which breathes life into her legitimate music, either. It's hard to maintain a charade when you're posting videos of yourself making grilled cheeses in the kitchen, so it's probably safe to assume that the K.Flay you see is quite close to the K.Flay that actually is. This type of consistent identity is largely absent amongst her contemporaries (making her an uncommon breed in the hip-hop community), so every time she comes out with new music, there's almost always a new crop of listeners who have fallen in love with her previous work and have been impatiently waiting for more. The last time around, it was her collaboration with the now-world famous Danny Brown on "Hail Mary" that grabbed everybody's attention. However, even then, K.Flay had already seen her fair share of success, and had ample time to fine-tune her sound into the hard-edged indie-rap that everybody enjoyed on What If Is. It wasn't her breakout effort, but it made a big statement, and it set the tone for this latest project, a full-length dubbed Life as a Dog Life as a Dog has a lot of similarities to What If Is, but it's much more developed, and seems to have fully crossed over into K.Flay's unique fusion of rock, rap, and pop. It's exactly there that she's found her calling, too, having no problem cranking out song after quality song, each one filled with clever wordplay and thought-provoking narratives. Nowhere in Life as a Dog will you be able to find and idea or theme that was overused or mishandled, and at times, it feels like K.Flay is drawing from an endless well of prose and poetry as she crams songs like "Fever" and "I'm Good" with a complexity and eloquence that will put most other MCs with similar aspirations to shame. Interestingly enough, the album's compositional uniformity isn't a detriment. Normally, when an album doesn't have a distinct variety of production styles, we'd probably ding it for being too vanilla, but in this instance, we can't get enough of her sound, so we're more than OK with hearing fourteen tracks where K.Flay combines her deft rapping with catchy riffs and slick hooks. When she combines this with her unparalleled ability to tell a captivating story in five minutes or less, what you have is a truly stellar album indeed. Right from the get-go, "Everyone I Know" (the album's first song) makes no excuses about her affinity for rock music, and the guitar notes are placed front and center for all to hear. From there it's all about "Make Me Fade" and "Bad Things". Both songs harken back to the darker sound on What If Is, and the music in both pairs well with her raspy singing voice. The pacing is on point, and if you were at all a fan of her previous work, these two will probably rank up there amongst your favorites on the track list. Rounding out the list of notables is "Turn It Around" and "Get It Right". "Turn It Around" (and "Get It Right", for that matter) is a bit slower than some of the earlier offerings, but that's to be expected as the album starts to wind down. It shows off a much more refined side to K.Flay's efforts as an artist, and it's impressive that she's able to put together such an amount of high-energy singles, and also that she can temper that sonic aggression when she needs to in order to evoke a much different response entirely from the listener. The songs still have a relatively similar format to the others, but there's a subtle shift in her approach, and even with these relatively minor tweaks, she's arrived at a completely different aesthetic. As a unified body of work, Life as a Dog is a worthy addition to K.Flay's discography, but the real victory is her penchant for sticking with a winning formula underlined with variety, and it's got us itching for more from her already. Life as a Dog is available on iTunes now.
K.Flay