After marking their territory with their forward-thinking 2011 debut, Black Up, Shabazz Palaces—the brainchild of Ishmael Butler and Tendai “Baba” Maraire—has released a slew of projects that could be charitably characterized as intellectual exercises. And 2017’s Quazarz and 2020’s The Don of Diamond Dreams found the Afrofuturist group’s sound becoming abstract to the point of oversimplification. These albums are loaded with thin beats, sparse production choices, and lyrics that swing between haughty and nursery-rhyme plainness.
Shabazz Palaces’s sixth album—and second after Maraire’s departure from the group—Robed in Rareness continues in this stripped-down mode. It’s easily their least substantial work to date, running a scant 24 minutes and composed of seven tracks. And yet, it still includes meandering material like the barely thought-out “Scarface Mace” and the bland “Hustle Crossers.”
“Gel Bait,” a one-dimensional stab at belittling “stupid ass bitches trolling on the internet,” at least begins to develop a catchy reverb-heavy groove about halfway through its runtime—that is, until the track abruptly ends. Butler repeats the phrase “Let’s get it on/You been talking shit, let’s get it on” throughout, though there’s hardly anything here that’s worth “getting it on” about.
Aside from the phantasmal “Binoculars,” where Butler and Seattle-based Royce the Choice drop a series of rapid-fire flexes with some equally quick-witted wordplay—“All of my jewelry is singing the harmonies/You should think again if you thinking ‘bout harming me”— Robed in Rareness features some of Shabazz Palaces’s least ambitious rapping (and weakest songwriting) to date. Elsewhere, the adversarial “P Kicking G” is marred by an unfunny refrain of “Shorty fly I’m the helipad/Land on me, you’re hella bad” that creeps up over and over again, and the song’s eventual AABB rhyme scheme suggests less minimalistic tendencies than outright laziness.
Too often, Butler mistakes being a headass with headiness, frequently indulging in being weird for weirdness’s sake. When he teams up with his own son, emo rapper Lil Tracey, on the celestial “Woke Up in a Dream,” the two shiftlessly trade verses over some twinkling synth keys and gossamer glissandos that are arranged rather carelessly. (Tracey’s distorted vocals, which sound they were recorded using a walkie-talkie, don’t help matters.)
Despite the fact that Robed in Rareness runs about the length of an episode of your average sitcom, its songs are so vaporous that one may have a difficult time remembering them. Put bluntly, the album underscores just how much Shabazz Palaces is running on fumes.
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