Shabazz Palaces
Exotic Birds of Prey
SUB POP
Fifteen years into his tenure as the top man of Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, producer-rapper Ishamel Butler is officially the Sun Ra of intergalactic avant-hop and its icily abstracted brand of poetic, broken melody. As a lone wolf since the departure of Shabazz co-founder and instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire in 2020, Butler has been free to be freer, taking whomever he collects as collaborators to fresher, increasingly abstruse, and further-forward heights. By this point, and particularly with the release of Exotic Birds of Prey, it hardly makes sense to call what Butler does “hip-hop” at all.
There may be, on occasion, nods to recognizable old-school electro-funk on the Afrika Bambaataa–esque “Take Me to Your Leader” and straight-up rap attacks such as the aptly titled “Myths of the Occult.” After that, however, Butler and his recent Shabazz-universe regulars Purple Tape Nate, Stas THEE Boss, and Lavarr the Starr—along with new collaborators Irene Barber, Cobra Coil, and Japreme Magnetic—carry their rants, chants, and semiotic texts far into the future with elements of noise, glitch, shoegaze, and computer jazz as their psychic North Star on tracks such as the in-the-red, post-jungle roar of “Well Known Nobody,” the formless “Angela,” and, yet another aptly titled Shabazz interlude, “Synth Dirt.”
As a seven-track mini-album, and a deconstructed companion piece to last year’s equally collaborative Robed in Rareness, Exotic Birds of Prey is a short, sharp, sudden slap in the face rather than an extended journey wrestling through the universe. It’s hard to imagine how much further into Afro-futurism Shabazz Palaces can go before they’re lost in the offshoots of Jupiter—but I’m enjoying the ride no matter how high they fly.
