B-Side Guys

Nico Lim operates under the moniker Flash Poetry with the urgency his chosen name implies—quick strikes of observation aimed at targets too big to miss. His debut Reality, Now attacks the contradictions of contemporary existence across forty-six minutes, moving between hip hop, psych rock, roots, reggae, and jazz with the restlessness of someone who finds single genres insufficient for cataloging the modern condition. The album functions as cultural autopsy and philosophical provocation in equal measure, diagnosing spiritual homelessness while refusing to prescribe easy remedies.

The title track opens proceedings with down-tempo grooves that establish the album’s core tension: how to maintain contemplative space in an age designed to eliminate it. Lim positions money and technology as false gods immediately, setting up the central argument he’ll spend the next eleven tracks elaborating. The production stays deliberately uncluttered here, leaving room for the words to land without competition. This pattern holds throughout much of the record—Reality, Now prioritizes clarity of message over sonic density, trusting that the ideas themselves carry enough weight.

“Every Ism Is A Wasm” pivots hard into psychedelic territory, guitars swirling around a blues-rock foundation as Lim dissects modern tribalism and meme culture with obvious disdain. The track title alone announces its thesis: all ideological certainties eventually collapse, reduced to past-tense irrelevance. The swagger in the delivery suggests Lim finds dark comedy in watching people construct identities from prefabricated positions, the marketplace of ideas revealed as just another marketplace. The blues-rock instrumentation reinforces this—a genre with its own exhausted mythologies pressed back into service for contemporary critique.

The challenge facing any artist attempting sociopolitical commentary through music is avoiding didacticism while maintaining clarity. Lim doesn’t always navigate this successfully. “Make God Great Again” wields its satire with such obvious intent that the tongue-in-cheek approach the press materials describe registers more as eye-roll than insight. Pointing out that modern spirituality has become commodified and politicized feels less like revelation than observation of the extremely obvious. The roots and hip hop collision happening musically proves more interesting than the lyrical content it carries.

“The Secret Life of Urban Trees” demonstrates where Lim’s approach works best—finding metaphorical resonance in specific images rather than broad pronouncements. Trees growing through concrete provide ready symbolism for resilience and natural wisdom persisting despite hostile environments, but the upbeat roots-hop energy prevents the track from sinking into heavy-handed reverence. The live-band feel mentioned in the album description comes through strongest here, rhythm section locked tight while other elements improvise around the pocket.

“From Dawn Till Dark” attempts an ambitious sweep, tracing evolutionary history from cosmic origins to fast food consumption. The swaggering blues instrumentation matches the scope of the concept—this is big-picture thinking delivered with corresponding musical bombast. Whether the track earns its ambition depends largely on tolerance for artists tackling timescales beyond individual experience. Lim commits fully, treating the Big Bang to Big Mac trajectory as legitimate subject matter for a four-minute song, and the commitment itself becomes part of the point.

The album’s production maintains consistent warmth throughout, avoiding the crisp digital sheen that might undercut the organic feel Lim clearly values. Guitars carry grit and space, keys float without excessive processing, electronic elements integrate rather than dominate. “Cracks” builds on floaty keys and electronic percussion but never loses the human feel, even as it warns about history’s cyclical nature. “Circles” deploys kaleidoscopic synths and delayed guitars to underscore its thematic preoccupation with repetition and pattern, the production choices mirroring the conceptual concerns.

Vocally, Lim moves between spoken word, rap, and poetry without strict delineation between modes. The fluidity serves the material—some observations demand the measured pace of spoken delivery, others need the rhythmic drive of rap cadence. “All Love Needs” strips back to tender spoken word for its love ballad format, demonstrating range while also exposing limitations. The earnestness that fuels the album’s political tracks can tip into sentimentality when applied to romantic subjects, the philosophical rigor loosening into generality.

“2043 Shop Like a Billionaire Bloodbath” represents the album’s most overtly satirical moment, the absurdist title promising chaos the track delivers. Here Lim leans fully into provocation, imagining dystopian consumerism as logical endpoint of current trajectories. The satirical approach works better when allowed to spiral into absurdity rather than staying tethered to realistic critique. Sometimes exaggeration clarifies better than accuracy.

“Eye for Eye” tightens focus considerably, gritty guitars and pulsing bass creating tension that matches the lyrical confrontation with productivity culture and emotional numbness. The pressure Lim describes—to stay constantly productive while remaining perpetually numb—gets reinforced through instrumentation that refuses to relax even when the tempo stays moderate. The discomfort becomes part of the message.

The album concludes with “Reality, Now, Pt. 2,” returning to the opening track’s themes with adjusted perspective. The repetition of title and concept creates bookend symmetry while the “rallying cry” approach shifts from diagnosis to prescription. After forty-plus minutes cataloging problems, Lim offers presence as solution—reclaiming attention in a restless age, choosing consciousness over distraction. The advice lands somewhere between obvious and essential, depending on listener receptivity to being told what they likely already know but struggle to practice.

Reality, Now succeeds most when Lim trusts his genre-blending instincts and lets the music carry equal weight with the messaging. The psych rock elements provide necessary grit, the reggae and roots foundations offer warmth that prevents the album from feeling like lecture, the jazz and funk looseness creates space for improvisation and spontaneity. When the balance tips too far toward didacticism, the musical bed starts feeling like vehicle rather than partner.

Forty-six minutes proves appropriate length—long enough to develop themes across multiple approaches, short enough to avoid exhausting goodwill. Lim clearly has thoughts about contemporary existence he considers worth sharing, and the debut album format gives him space to elaborate without the constraints of single releases or EPs. Whether listeners need another artist diagnosing cultural malaise depends partly on how much diagnosis they’ve already consumed, how much more they can productively absorb.

The album title’s demand for presence—”Reality, Now”—doubles as instruction and description. Lim insists on engaging with the world as it currently exists rather than as we might wish it to be or remember it was. The “now” part carries urgency, suggesting that attention delayed is attention lost, that consciousness demands immediacy. Flash Poetry delivers on the flash part through quick observational strikes. Whether it delivers on the poetry depends on how much philosophical weight you require your metaphors to carry, how much genre fusion you need in your cultural critique, how willing you are to let someone spend forty-six minutes explaining what’s wrong with everything while grooving through multiple musical traditions. The album asks for your attention and your patience in equal measure, offering grooves and grievances as fair trade.