What does Sup Forums think of the new Shabazz Palaces double album? Only just now thru the left one, and I have to say...

What does Sup Forums think of the new Shabazz Palaces double album? Only just now thru the left one, and I have to say, probably better and more forward-thinking than Lese Majesty, and I love that album (though it is admittedly a low point).

The first half is much better.

I can't really tell if these albums are ahead of their time or not.

one thing that I did notice is that they used tropes common to mumble rap, albeit in a more experimental way, so it's as least as current as lil yachty

I really want to enjoy Shabazz Palaces, and I really liked Shine a Light, but ultimately, after having listened to them for about two months, these are both just not doing it for me.

Yeah, they incorporated a lot of hooks in here that are really trap-influenced.

I'm starting to feel this. There's a lot of cool ideas and stuff, but it's just not really clicking as well as I'd like. I loved Ishmael and his voice in Digable Planets + all his old features in stuff, but I don't know how I feel about these new Shabazz Palaces projects. They definitely give off the vibe that they're forward thinking and abstract, but are they really that good? I definitely appreciate the experimentation and the conceptual themes, but I don't think the baseline song-writing is really hitting the mark.

OP here
I see these albums as more of an elaboration upon the sound established pre-LM. Whereas LM was a lot of weird inaccessible experimentation, these albums (at least the first one) are still experimental, but try to fit that experimentation within recent developments in popular music

better than black up, not quite as good as lese majesty though

bump for visibility

I listened to quazarz like 2 months ago and found it really boring

another bump cuz i wish sp would get more discussion on here

Lese Majesty is one of the best hip-hop albums ever made desu

yeah but try playing any song off the back half of that album at a party; you'll get banned from the aux for a while

what's your point

A key defining characteristic of hip hop is danceability. Imo a great hip hop album would not have an entire half of the lp that shifts feels so many times that the average person can't keep up with the beat, let alone the little bits of obtuse, filtered vocals. Believe me, there is some very compelling stuff there, but you have to put in work to figure it out, and it's not the most cohesive vibe. Like they proved they could stitch together a good LP with creative beats with Black Up and the previous two records, LM just kind of floats around the ether in the latter half without diving in to investigate what beats could have been. New Black Wave is one of my favorite beats of all time, but it isn't very well-defined and I only really understood it after running the LP through a distortion pedal to and eq'ing it. I listened to the album afterwards without any eq or distortion and I barely could find where the beat that I heard initially was in the mix

>A key defining characteristic of hip hop is danceability.

stopped reading there, you're retarded. that may have been true in the early 80s but hip-hop has moved far, far beyond that, into artistic territory (which music purely for dancing will of course, never enter).

You'll get kicked out because they're normies who don't know who Shabazz Palaces are. Your comment is stupid. That's like saying TPAB is bad because you can't dance to it. Or that madvillainy is bad because you can't dance to it.

>TPAB isnt danceable
>Madvillainy isn't danceable
t. People who can't dance
Name 4 songs on the back half of the album that aren't 1:30 of uninspired tinkering thrown together for lack of a complete album come release date.

I was never defending the album. I was just saying how stupid your statement was. Have fun dancing to mortal man and rainbows around your friends though, because they'll kick you out just as fast for those songs. Guess those albums are bad too.

I'm not saying every track on an album has to be danceable, but having almost half of your tracks never fully expound upon a compelling rhythm that you yourself chose to be in the song just under the rest of the mix for 1:30 is just overindulgent. I was giving my reason why I thought that Black Up is by far the superior album, because the ethereal, non-beat-grounded parts are complemented by deep, interesting, booming rhythms. And the lyricism is far more straightforward, while still maintaining that quirky, abstract SP vibe.

Finally a thread about these.

Liked both but I thought Born on a Gangster Star was just 'okay' whereas vs. the Jealous Machines was pretty good. The latter I only liked the first listen but it grew on me much more the second. I found the former to be closer to Black Up but it was still just a tad flat. vs. the Jealous Machines was a departure in terms of sound but it was the better album definitely. Like everything Shabazz Palaces does, it doesn't really completely do it for me, but that's somewhat expected when sonically the group is pretty ambitious and explores unconventional sounds. I mean, that seems to go for me for almost any experimental artist. Honestly throughout their entire discography, the catchier, more conventional beats tend to be my favorite and I'm not sure if I want to apologize for that.

Neither really approached Black Up though.

Anybody got a link?

next-level shit. nobody else is on this band's plane of existance right now.

>b-but its boring

no, that's just because you're attempting to approach it as if it's a hip-hop album. plebeians.

That's what it sounded like you were saying.

bump to keep it bumpin' well into the night