The Quietus

As a big, big fan of Flying Lotus’ band of genre-defying Brainfeeder pals, I’ve always felt Shabazz Palaces might be the most underhyped, with their Daft Punk-esque costumes and slower, intricately mixed and always forward-thinking beats, often getting swallowed up in the hype over Flylo, Kamasi Washington or Thundercat. This double release - what should have been their epic double feature - doesn’t exactly help me prove my point.

When I first told one of my friends SP were coming out with a twin, highly conceptual pair of records, he simply groaned. Both of us would pick Black Up as their best work - delightfully experimental, motivated and clocking in at just 36 minutes. He argued that there’s no way they could make the same kind of impact with two albums that would be 23 songs in total, and though I fought him at the time I’m afraid he’s right. On 'Moon Whip Quäz', frontman Palaceer Lazaro (Ishmael Butler) repeats "I'm Quazarz, born on a gangster star" and transitions, with his musical partner Tendai 'Baba' Maraire, into an underwater, extra fuzzy, and out-of-this-world rendition of the previously thudding groove. It’s the high-point of a two album release that seems to have so much potential, but don’t quite make it there.

The albums revolve around Butler taking on the alien persona Quazarz, and analysing the political landscape of the US from an outsider perspective. Thematically, it’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek take on the American state-of-the-nation music that seems to be popping up in about every genre right now (albeit for good reason). However, the impact is lost - the alien theme just isn’t used creatively or extensively enough.

The first album, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star is the less experimental of the two, flavoured with 90s-style looped tracks and the consistently groovy drum bits that Tendai Maraire can always be counted on for. It’s opening track ‘Since C.A.Y.A.’ features a jazzy bassline, heavy, techno-sounding vocals, and mechanistic whizzing sounds - a hopeful introduction that grooves hard. Both albums are a major high point for Maraire’s production, which is stimulating, unpredictable and still relatively accessible. But lyrically, Butler’s performance does not keep up. There are few memorable verses other than the catchy, possible future live-show chant on ‘Fine Ass Hairdresser’ (“I got my money, I got my honey, I got my gunny, everything’s straight!”), and maybe on autotuned song ‘Shine a Light’.

The second of the double releases is has mixed tempos, shifting tonalities, and a poetic, spoken-word intro from Butler on the “soft cyber caress” which lays out the futuristically shaded America he moulds all the album's verses around. “We talk with guns… kill love, kill money,” he says, introducing his closer analysis of the state of affairs ambitiously and broadly, and preparing us for an intellectual American culture slam. But again, the frame set up in the opening track is not properly filled, and this time there aren't as many catchy jams to help us ignore its lyrical deficiencies. By the second track Butler takes a few always-entertaining slams at other rappers, without being quite entertaining enough for it to work - an irony that leaves me feeling like it’s possible I just don't understand. I skip through to a decently fun track ‘Julian’s Dream’ or, thankfully, wonderfully DJ-ready thumping track ’30 Clip Extension’. This, like ‘Fine Ass Hairdresser’ stands apart from the rest of the album - quirky, fun, packed with a serious point.

The album is by no means horrible, just disappointing and repetitive, chock full of revamped old school rhythms that don’t have the gratifying content to match. A good handful of songs - ‘When Cats Claw’, ‘Since C.A.Y.A’, ‘Fine Ass Hairdresser’, ‘Julian’s Dream’, ‘Moon Whip Quäz’ and ’30 Clip Extension’ - deserve to be judged independently. However, as someone who was really looking forward to this double release as a sort of magnum opus for a group I find incredibly underrated, it’s simply a little bland. I suppose I’ll just spend my time listening to their older stuff until my mind finally wraps itself around this piece or they come out with an album that lives up to their talents again.

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Drowned In Sound 80

That ambition now seems realised on this, their first double album, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines, an epic exploration of technology, rap music and contemporary America. This double suite sees Butler play 'Quazarz', a sentient being from another universe sent to the opaquely titled 'Amurderca' and find a violent, unwelcoming place where everyone is reliant on machines. Sound familiar?

While broadly speaking these third and fourth albums by Shabazz Palaces are what audiences have come to expect from them musically, this big concept is both at once an excellent means to explore some significant themes but all in keeping within the duo's musical universe. Melodies, samples and rhythms largely drift in from the ether, like passing asteroids from the video game of the same name, with your more traditional song structures happening as anomalies such as on ‘Moon Whip Quaz’ or 30 Clip Extension’. This is partly because the duo write and record much of the music on live instruments as opposed to sequencing or sampling, meaning they are able to create their atmospherics naturally.

The common thread that flows through both albums make it an easy experience to listen as a whole, and while the concept of a double album can be off–putting for some, these records shift and weave so seamlessly that one barely notices the combined one hr 30 runtime. That said, it is a record that rewards repeat listens, as its length and depth are well worth letting wash over you.

Born a Gangster Star is the intentionally more disorientating of the two records, introducing a strange new world where outsiders like Quazarz immediately feel alienated. As has become Shabazz Palaces' calling card, spacey hip–hop rivals more traditional jazz to create the sense of confusion inhabited by the 'alien' experience. ‘Shine a Light’ is a very rare example of a more traditionally minded rap song in terms of its use of classic soul music samples. Meanwhile ‘Parallax’ is for all intensive purposes a jazz fusion song, especially due to its drum sample. Elsewhere ‘Fine Ass Hairdresser’ blasts gun culture while ‘The Neurochem Mixalogue’ teases an almost unthinkable auto-tuned RnB track before giving way to one of Butler and Maraire's best and most sinister beats.

Meanwhile, …vs. The Jealous Machines is easily the more direct of the two, announced instantly by opening track ‘Welcome to Quazarz’ where a character from the aforementioned Amurderca details his brutal country, surmising that “here, we kill”. Meanwhile, ’30 Clip Extention’ runs down lazy rappers and the macho attitudes which feed into “Amurderca’s” violent motives. But, there are moments of beauty too as ‘Efferminence’ shows, finding a strange comfort in people’s connectivity. Similarly the hilariously titled ‘Love in the Time of Kanye’ is a genuinely sweet love song which gives the record/s a beating heart.

Not everything is as memorable as everything else and there are a few tracks which perhaps have a tendency to meander a bit too long, but these do not take away from the overall feel of the album, more just drift off into space as is the predominant feeling of the two records. Finale ‘Quazarz on 23rd' leave things as ambiguously as where we started proving there is no easy answer to the current state of America. Nor should Shabazz Palaces be expected to find them or really be interested in them. This is a snapshot of a crazy–quilt country seen through the eyes of an 'alien' which in the contemporary, real political climate is currently a very scary position to be in indeed. Instead, the Quazarz albums are a fictionalised framework to comment on the real-life myriad parts of the modern world, especially America, and work thrillingly well as such. There remains to be no one else like Butler and Maraire and may their idiosyncratic approach to music and society at large continue if we continue to get such thrilling records as this.

The Guardian 80

The Seattle rap duo stay weird without losing their edge, with two concept albums about a visitor from space – Quazars: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs the Jealous Machines

In years to come, when the career of the Seattle rap duo Shabazz Palaces is viewed through a historical lens, it may well be opined that these third and fourth albums were substantially more straightforward, even more commercial, than their predecessor, 2014’s Lese Majesty. Said opinion would be correct, although it’s worth noting that these two interlinking conceptual works about an alien called Quazarz (“a sentient being from somewhere else, an observer sent here to Amurderca to chronicle and explore as a musical emissary”, explains the accompanying blurb) involve muffled, lo-fi instrumentals; tracks that sound like several entirely unconnected pieces of music spliced together; and at least one song on which the rapping appears to be in a different time signature to the backing track. Among a panoply of obscure special guests is the Shogun Shot, who raps with a pronounced lisp, and a man who calls himself Fly Guy Dai, a name that carries the suggestion, alas unfounded, that he might be from Aberystwyth.

So a judgment on the relative commerciality of these albums tells you rather more about how wilfully abstruse the music on Lese Majesty was, than about the potential of Quazarz: Born On a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs the Jealous Machines to unseat Ed Sheeran from the top of the album charts.

Related: Shabazz Palaces' Ishmael Butler: 'Starry is a way I can kind of describe myself'

Pitchfork 76

Ishmael Butler’s free-form hip-hop project continues to defy convention with a pair of companion albums that view contemporary America as though it were a strange and hostile planet.

Tiny Mix Tapes 70

Shabazz Palaces
Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star

[Sub Pop; 2017]

Rating: 3.5/5

The Guardian 60

(Sub Pop)

Now that mainstream hip-hop has gone jazz – witness Kendrick Lamar’s association with Thundercat, for one – the premise of this release by Seattle Afro-futurists Shabazz Palaces (one of two linked long-players) might not seem so out-there. Quazarz is an interstellar traveller, seriously unimpressed with how they do things in “Amurderca”. But even with the paradigm shift, Shabazz Palaces remain magnificently eccentric, enlisting Thundercat on Since CAYA, quoting Kraftwerk at length on the nagging Moon Whip Quäz. Tracks such as Dèesse Du Sang, meanwhile, provide a haunted analogue magic that is hard to shake off.