Shabazz Palaces
Lese Majesty
(Sub Pop)
Three stars
Seattle first marked its card as a modern musical force during grunge's heyday – two decades later, the sounds coming out of the American city are very different, but the game-changing intent continues. Shabazz Palaces are a mind's eye-opening hip-hop collective led by Ishmael Butler, a man who is currently appearing in his publicity photos with two huge snakes on gold-chain leads. But the "hip-hop" in that description is used only in the loosest sense –Lese Majesty, which is Butler and co's second album, is a patchwork of trippy beats and abstract rhymes that often threatens to implode under the weight of its own imagination. There's more than a hint of the late jazz visionary Sun Ra about its astral vision, while you can imagine the Los Angeles experimenter Flying Lotus doffing his flat cap to spaced-out explorations such as Down 155th in the MCM Snorkel. The 90 seconds of Solemn Swears, meanwhile, is splattered with 2014's most bizarre similes. Lese Majesty won't, admittedly, appeal to those with more vanilla rap tastes, but it does almost exclusively break new sonic ground.