Yes, I’ve joined Josh’s cult—though as a ’90s kid, I’ve gotta say I lean a little more Tribe Called Quest than Shabazz Palace’s progenitor, Digable Planets.
The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones reviews Shabazz Palaces’ “Black Up,” the album that had Josh making ecstatic daily forays into music writing earlier this summer. (Full article for subscribers only; synopsis here).
Calling the Seattle group—headed by onetime Digable Planets frontman Palaceer Lazaro—“a mysterious unit,” Frere-Jones writes,
Shabazz Palaces doesn’t make music you can dance to, though it facilitates nodding. The rhythm rarely builds to peaks or gets much faster than a lope. “Black Up” is a lesson in forceful insolence, stocked with music that rests in the low end, only to be unpredictably split apart by noise.On “Are you … Can you … Were you? (Felt),” Butler opens the song by repeating “It’s a feeling,” and that simple sentiment can help you navigate the somewhat disorganized set of symbols and sounds. …
Shabazz Palaces uses sonic fog and unusual mixing to obscure its charms—a sly and unpredictable lead m.c. and a clutch of sonorous tones—not because the group is dissuading anyone from entering its world but because it is committed to high-resolution disorientation. All of this is keyed to pleasure. “Black Up” would once have been called a “headphones album”: It is rich and striated, and was made for the closeup of the in-ear speaker.
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