Shabazz Palaces - Exotic Birds of Prey Review
Latest Shabazz Palaces album opens another portal into synth-soaked dimensions and Afrofuturist, celestial reach.
Initially, it doesn't appear that there's much connecting Seattle rapper and producer Ishmael Butler's former jazz hip-hop group Digable Planets with current intergalactic project Shabazz Palaces, but lyrical references to alien space travel, a penchant for narrative interjections, and amorphous sonic expanses on Planets' debut album Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) suggest that the cosmos has been beckoning long before Palaces' self-titled releases back in 2009.
His eighth LP with Sub Pop, Exotic Birds of Prey conjures another heady brew of synth-soaked experimental rap that suffuses Sun Ra's celestial reach with P-Funk's acid-fried grit. Drenched in Afrofuturist psych, Butler's spaced-out production explores the uncharted terrain of experimental hip-hop with a kaleidoscopic set of seven songs that viscously stick and gel to each other, enveloped in gelatinous bass, trippy beats, and omnipotent command.
Album opener 'Exotic BOP' hypnotically slithers and crawls all over itself, languid synth blips fizz and foam against each other like a chemical reaction around the track's soulful vocal delivery. 'Goat Me' too illustrates Butler's masterfully nebulous production with its soaring glacial keys punctured by jabs of industrial itch revealing depths of disquiet beneath the hypnagogic trance.
The detours and creative avenues within Exotic Birds of Prey can seize you with an urgency atypical of the album's strung-out character. 'Take Me To Your Leader', a collab with his 'alter-ego' Lavarr the Starr', is an angular Kraftwerk electro piece that ripples mathematically atop its austere chasm, and 'Well Known Nobody' scores guest vocalist OC Notes' sardonic lyrical spits with furious guitar attack atop stuttering beats a highlight moment that shows Butler can steer the spaceship trepidatiously to hazardous, punk zones should the moment take him.
Fleeting in nature, Exotic Birds of Prey often feels slightly short of the material needed for a cohesive studio album journey that Shabazz Palace's proggy ambitions grasp at. Across the record's twenty-odd minutes, there's a nagging feeling the conceptual channelling is missing a 'centrepiece' song to balance out the album's spoken interludes and hang everything together (think Trans Europe-Express' title track), pushing the release over to firm 'album' territory rather than wavering undecidedly as an EP.
Radiating with ideas and creative ingenuity, Shabazz Palaces has concocted another immersive and intriguing take on hip-hop filled with distinct flavours you've never tasted and colours you've never seen. Like a strange visitation promising you 'ascendency', Exotic Birds of Prey shows Butler's gaze is still lightyears ahead.