- Not a whole lot is known about Seattle's Shabazz Palaces, even now on the release of their second album. I wonder if they didn't expect anybody to be interested and didn't do any promo and then when it blew up - hell, this is working, why wreck the mystique? They do have a bit of that, too. The beats are what does it I think: lustrous, synthy, echoing. They're also very much on the avant-garde tip that you'll hear pouring out of places like Brainfeeder right now - that's really nice to hear. The genie that conjured up this arabesque dream, one Palaceer Lazaro is also Butterfly of 90s jazz-hoppers Digable Planets. You can really hear the influence of the Digables on the Shabazz sound: the chilled out feel, the laidback flows, the poetic lyricism and, perhaps the crazy song titles too. An unexpectedly interesting new voice in a world often accused of lacking exactly that.