Shabazz Palaces exists at the point of sublimation. For the past 15 years, Ishmael Butler and his cast of collaborators have drifted further and further into the outer reaches, deconstructing and reassembling hip-hop, jazz, and kosmische conventions into sprawling, proggy rhapsodies. Their grip on song structure has loosened with each record and, by their most recent, 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey, nearly dissipated altogether. Butler’s imperturbable, reverb-soaked raps can feel like communiques from some cosmic entity ruminating on our stardust origins and infinite potentialities. It’s a Style Sport, the latest Shabazz Palaces album, delivers plenty of that signature haze, but it plants one foot on solid ground, reaching through space and time without becoming completely untethered.
Over seven full-lengths, Butler has created a multi-volume instruction manual for transcendence. 2011’s Black Up, his first masterpiece outside Digable Planets, was a treatise on reinvention, a reminder that our eyes can adjust to darkness and find a path through it. For 2023’s Robed in Rareness, he enlisted a massive list of contributors, illustrating the power of community to realize a shared vision. It’s a Style Sport explores memory as a tool for analyzing the grand mysteries. He’s always harnessed the aesthetics and swagger of eras past—’80s electro drums pepper the Shabazz Palaces catalog—but here, Butler takes a pointed look at his personal history for inspiration, indexing what he’s learned and where it led him. It’s a record rooted in gratitude, a serious and smirking ode to resilience and curiosity.
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That turn inward makes It’s a Style Sport seem small and quiet at first, curling into itself rather than expanding. Longtime collaborator Erik Blood foregrounds Butler’s dry drum machines in the mix, letting every other element shuffle around them, snaking toward the spotlight for a brief moment and retreating back into the brume. Even Butler’s voice, typically the centerpiece of his songs, often sinks into the shadows, giving cuts like “Olivia According to Touch” and “Jheri Curl Jump” the hushed meandering of an inner monologue. It’s as though we’re viewing the record through a pinhole, aware that there’s a teeming universe just beyond our sightline. Turn the volume up and that pinhole dilates, revealing swirling galaxies of vocal harmonies, upright bass plucks, and cascading piano runs.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
