Shabazz Palaces’ Sub Pop debut Black Up breathed indelible soul into the Seattle duo’s formidable style, an assemblage of chaotic grooves that spun out, pivoted on a crafty turn, and hightailed it home along the back roads. The 2011 album cut former Digable Planets member Ishmael Butler’s opaque mysticism loose on a palette of intricate, dreamy soundscapes provided by resident producer Tendai Maraire, sacrificing traditional songwriting conventions like verses and choruses to sojourn to rap’s frayed edges. Ish’s musings on love resonated in their leveraging of heady imagery with wizened world-weariness; his songs triumphed in their arrangement of familiar ideas into peculiar shapes.
Rather than mining Black Up’s fertile retrofuturist boom-bap further, the group have since decamped to parts unknown. The duo’s latest album Lese Majesty boasts 18 songs grouped into seven suites, with a subtle science fiction theme. If that sounds a bit Close to the Edge, get used to it. Lese Majesty aims to free the group’s songwriting apparatus from its trademark purposefulness, to chart a course that zags where earlier work zoomed. While the opening suite “The Phasing Shift” leads with three straight cuts in the spirit and form of Black Up, the record doesn't stay in one place for long. From the moment “They Come in Gold” fades into the undulating drone of “Solemn Swears”, it's clear that, for the duo, space is the place.
The “Touch & Agree” suite is a good primer for what to expect from Lese Majesty. “Solemn Swears” builds on a bed of synth pulses and a playful riff from Ish before collapsing into “Harem Aria”, a disorienting romp whose upbeat never hits where it’s supposed to. “Harem” becomes “Noetic Noiromantics”, which peels a few layers back to tease a hook out of the maelstrom only to dissipate as quickly as it congealed. Lese’s individual tracks aren’t so much songs as ramshackle ideas subject to crumble or explode into something unfamiliar at a moment’s notice. The passage through these movements feels like an itinerant drift, a conscious rejection of the methodical drive of its predecessor.
Lese’s moves aren’t always subtle, though; the album gets shiftier as it progresses, dispensing with the comfort of thematic unity. The run from “#CAKE” to “Mind Glitch Keytar Theme” flies through tribal drum vamps, Miami bass, horror soundtrack synths, and a frayed 190 BPM house workout in just a few minutes, ramping up the intensity before easing off it with the album closing chillout suite “Murkings on the Oxblood Starway”. This is a producer’s album, constructed to showcase a versatile sound architecture the same way Black Up highlighted Ish’s way with words.
Sometimes that means Ish's vocals are a tool in the production arsenal, distorted and distended rhythmic elements instead of guiding points. In Lese’s more erratic passages, Ish is content to toy around with an intriguing turn of phrase instead of unfurling the impressionistic poetry that electrified Black Up, but that doesn’t mean this is just an assortment of chants and sketches; Ishmael’s showcases are a grounding force for a body of songs fixated on the cosmos.
“Lèse-majesté” is a capital crime in stricter monarchic societies that loosely translates to "the offending of royalty." It's an appropriate title for the network of verses Ishmael presents here, which glibly taunt the kings of the modern rap mainstream for slacking on the job. Questioned about Shabazz Palaces' overarching purpose in a recent NPR interview, Ish retorted, "Make no mistake, this is an attack," and cuts like "Suspicion of a Shape" ("All you guys are quantized") and “...down 155th in the MCM Snorkel" (“The type of MC you’d be back then is ‘sucka’”) are rife with bile for feted lesser talents.
Similar to recent albums by the Roots and Common, Lese Majesty is an Armageddon-esque suicide mission to crash into rap's consciousness in hopes of tipping it away from a dangerous path. While its peers have set about their objectives this year with a staunch, unblinking seriousness of purpose, Ish is more forgiving. The Rucker reminiscence "...down 155th in the MCM Snorkel" recalls the days of doorknocker earrings, Dapper Dan suits, and fair ones without pining for a time machine or hawking staid old school invective. These aren’t condescending “Real Hip-Hop” platitudes: this is a call to arms for hip-hop’s creative fringe to snatch the reins from a power structure more interested in self-preservation than the advancement of the culture. The soul of Shabazz Palaces is pairing next-gen sounds with classic brass-tacks show-and-prove emceeing, and Lese Majesty tugs those extremes as far as they've ever been pulled; that it never shows signs of wear speaks to the strength of the bond.
