Shabazz Palaces’s aptly titled Exotic Birds of Prey opens with a guarantee to spin “the latest in eclectic music.” Depending on your appetite for adventure, that will come off as a promise or a threat. Like last year’s Robed in Rareness, the album feels at times designed to weed out casual listeners, with Shabazz Palaces mastermind Ishmael Butler making no effort to sweeten his brash experimentalism with memorable hooks or conventional song structures.
Exotic Birds of Prey maintains an unsettling vibe as it wanders through hip-hop subgenres and warps them into abstractions of themselves. “Exotic BOP,” for one, feels chaotic and claustrophobic, with cavernous synths blurring the edges around guest Purple Tape Nate’s monotonously simple vocal melody. The glitched-out “Goat Me” similarly features reverb-drenched interjections from Cobra Coli buried beneath a spacious cloud-rap beat.
While Stas Thee Boss and Irene Barber offer a little more of substance on “Angela,” the track provides even less in terms of structure. Its spacey freeform funk is distantly reminiscent of the more rambling tracks on Solange’s When I Get Home, itself a determined exercise in vibe-setting. Elsewhere, “Well Known Nobody” is another genre meltdown, this time mixing jazz-rap with an atonal electric guitar riff and a sarcastic monologue from OCnotes: “I’m not a cynic, go to the mall, I love the president most of all.”
Butler’s willingness to alienate listeners prevents Exotic Birds of Prey from reaching the heights of 2011’s Black Up and 2014’s Lese Majesty, which both balanced their weirder instincts with bona-fide earworms. Songs float from one idea to another, without bothering to give us much in terms of a lyric or melody to latch onto, making the album feel at times like a glorified beat tape.
The exception is “Myths of the Occult,” a cinematic joint with the most refreshingly straightforward rapping on the entire album. Japreme Magnetic’s old-school delivery is stripped of the heavy reverb and processing that drowns out much of Exotic Birds of Prey’s other vocal tracks. Paired with the track’s off-kilter bassline, it catches the ear immediately and provides a reprieve from the surrounding relentless abstraction.
“Take Me to Your Leader” sends Exotic Birds of Prey out on a spooky, almost apocalyptic mode, providing a fitting capstone for an album built for late-night burn rides. At just seven tracks, the album proves to be paradoxically sparse in its loose, leisurely construction but dense in its intense inscrutability. Exotic Birds of Prey’s resistance to form, accessibility, and interpretation will either draw you in or push you away—and that’s probably the point.
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