LESE MAJESTY
(Sub Pop)
Shabazz Palaces
★★★★ Does Seattle rapper Ishmael Butler regret that he once went by the insufferably twee stage name of ‘‘Butterfly’’ in 90s jazz-rap group, Digable Planets? Possibly. Do I regret that I wrote him off as a born-again black beatnik more concerned with style than substance? Definitely.
Butler’s current project, Shabazz Palaces, is a musical marvel, snipping the guy-ropes that keep hip-hop tethered to its ghetto roots so it can soar upwards into the cosmos.
Free-floating yet conceptually dense, defiantly uncommercial, stuffed with spacey sounds and wigged-out wordplay, new album Lese Majesty is a record marked by sonic and lyrical adventurousness, with barely a facile bebop loop in sight. Welcome back, Ishmael Butler, all is forgiven.
Not that Shabazz Palaces is a solo project. At Butler’s side is Tendai Maraire, multi-instrumentalist son of the late Zimbabwean Mbira/Marimba master Dumisani Maraire. He sets Butler’s complex rhyme schemes inside spinning constellations of sound, the samples so deeply disrupted by studio effects, it’s unclear which instrument birthed them.
Two fine self-released EPs in 2009 gave notice that this dynamic duo had something fresh to offer. Two years later, debut album Black Up blew minds far and wide.
Album number two is a more abstract and electronic affair with a similar sense of spacial disorientation to Jamaican dub. The antithesis of shouty self aggrandisement, Forerunner Foray sees Butler’s vocal almost disappear inside a fog of swirling synths, electro handclaps and echo effects. Touch And Agree employs a sweeping broom as a beat. Soundview rides the kind of slippery Ron Carter double-bass booms that once informed Digable tunes Rebirth Of Slick and Jimi Diggin’ Cats. And the sinister robot groove of #Cake is surely the perfect backdrop for a song about ‘‘secret meetings in the stratosphere’’.
It’s an album as notable for what it lacks as what it contains.
No punchline couplets. No redundant posse cuts.
No overworked similes or battle-rhyme brags. Sonically innovative and creatively uncompromised, Lese Majesty is a timely reminder that hiphop is capable of far more than continually telling the same old stories in the same old ways.