Last week, I got excited about the New York Times ' rave review of Shabazz Palaces' new CD. But the defining and in-deep review of the Seattle hip hop scientists' new disc, Black Up , was actually published a week earlier on Pitchfork by a Seattle music writer: Eric Grandy.



Grandy takes the time to lay out the band's exciting cryptic history and then takes even more time—the time it deserves—to detail the sounds on this exceptional CD. It's a big moment for Seattle, and I'm glad a writer like Grandy got to capture it for us. His review is worth quoting at length:

Most of these tracks end somewhere very different from where they begin. "Free Press and Curl" opens the album with a down but defiant rap ("Musically and bitch-wise, too/ I lost the best beat that I had") delivered over stuttering crunching drums and bass vibrations. Three minutes in, the tempo slows into a kind of galley song, a murky drift over which Butler fires off a couple of final, biblically imperative ("thou shalt...") verses.

"An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum" (the album's track titles throughout are fascinating) begins as a playground chant stretched and smeared into a queasy loop over muffled kick and grainy snare. But then after a minute, everything drops out for a spooky mbira solo from Shabazz sideman and percussionist Tendai Maraire.

"Youlogy" starts as a busy, druggy swirl-- a heaving bass, a synth wobbling in one ear, voices cut and pasted, echoing asymmetrically, everything dropping out on the word "high" in "to get you HIGH"-- and then breaks for some jazz trumpet and snippets of stylized dialogue, before proceeding as an altogether different, relatively cleared-out, bass-and-drum track.

That Shabazz Palaces' songs follow such inscrutable routes makes it all the more striking when they coalesce around a repeated word or phrase. "Free Press" builds up to the rousing chant, "You know I'm free!" over a ghosted gospel chorus.

Butler is still fascinated by art's ability to communicate what conversations cannot. "I can't explain it with words/ I have to do it," he raps on one song; on another, he delivers one of the album's catchiest, most motivating maxims: "If you talk about it, it's a show/ But if you move about it, then it's a go." Beyond the "just do it" swooshing of these lines is a meatier paradox: that Butler uses a lyrical form to decry the limitations of words and exalt the meaningfulness of action. In Shabazz Palaces, Butler enacts the union of these opposites-- words as action, action into words-- and it's no exaggeration to call this transmutation what it is: magic.

I bought the CD last night and have only just started digging in.

Great footnote so far: There are two jazz vocal cameos by PubliCola's favorite local Duke Ellington hip hop space aliens—lesbian duo TheeSatisfaction. The first one, "Endeavors for Never,"  featuring a funeral-march jazz horn over computer blips, steals the show with its casual beauty.