When Nothing Is Completely New

Two albums recently dropped that caught my attention quickly. Upon first listen, they both may seem like nothing else you’ve ever heard. Or at least, not quite.

Injury Reserve’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Tirzah’s Colourgrade are both exercises in the unconventional. One sounds like it came out of left field and the other sounds like it came from outside the stadium. Both are unique creations, and their creators are standing on the shoulders of ancestors, parents, and kids that graduated a few years before you.

The other day, my 12 year old stepdaughter told me she doesn’t listen to music made before 2017. Firstly, that’s a lie. Also, that’s stupid. It’s something a pre-teen with a “unique identity complex” would say and think (yes, I made that up).

It’s stupid for a number of reasons. Mainly though, it’s because art is rarely, if ever, completely new. Sure, a particular album can sound like no other album you’ve heard. But even still, its creator has nearly certainly listened to music before, and was inspired by that music.

I say this because, as singular as my recommendations are, they are not without predecessors. A particular forerunner that comes to mind is Ishmael Butler and his group Shabazz Palaces. (Their song “Forerunner Foray” is one of their best, and acutely self-aware.)

At 52, Butler (or “Ish”)(or “Butter Fly”) has been a pioneer for a staggeringly long time, especially considering that Hip-Hop is often considered a Young Man’s Game. 

In 1987, he helped start the Jazz Rap group Digable Planets. Their album Blowout Comb (1994) is widely considered a classic Hip-Hop record and a quintessential example of the subgenre. The group took vinyl sampling and focused on Jazz chops and loose, natural-sounding drums. The cadence of their rapping had a swing and a transcendent hipness. (Insert “Miles Davis peeing his pants is cool” joke). A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul have made great Jazz Rap (or Jazz-influenced) records, but Blowout Comb is, to me, a pillar.

After nine years of dormancy, Butler returned (quietly) with a low-promotion release titled Bright Black. This time, he was part of a different trio, Cherrywine. Bight Black has a mixtape quality. The audio is slightly unpolished, and the order of the songs seems mostly arbitrary. Unlike Digable Planets, this new outfit however, featured little to no Jazz influence. Instead, the music is filled to the brim with psychedelia, funk, and pseudo-bravado meant as a criticism of Hip-Hop’s increasing thematic focus on excessiveness (women, cars, jewelry, money).

Ishmael’s sarcasm is subtle however, so it would be easy to mistake his braggadocio as genuine. Frankly, it’s a shame that Bright Black didn’t receive more attention. It’s got a synthetic funkiness akin to massively popular contemporaries like Daft Punk and The Neptunes. Perhaps the sound was too “out there” for mainstream popularity, but I’ll always regard it as a favorite.

Cherrywine’s lone album may have been overlooked, but it was the prototype to Ish’s real return.

In the late 2000s, a duo out of Seattle named Shabazz Palaces emerged. Butler (now donning the moniker “Palaceer Lazaro”) and Tendai Maraire (son of legendary Zimbabwean performer of the mbira) had created something new. And it was undeniably different. They released some mysterious EPs while keeping their identities quiet. Still, the musical direction of the group caught people’s attention. No one had quite heard anything like it. The best way I could describe it (however insufficient) is Clipse mixed with the weirdest parts of Radiohead, tinged with a strong African flair.

Drunken drum beats, Glitch Hop, African percussion, heavy sub bass, and jazz come together on Shabazz’s debut Black Up. Ish’s prior lyrical subtlety evolved into clever, metaphoric critiques of not only his Hip-Hop peers, but of society as a whole. And he delivered his quips with nasty confidence.

Their follow up Lese Majesty, is one of my favorites, all time. Palaces retained their signature sound, but they increased the reverb, delay, and general spaciness. It launched their otherworldly sound into another universe, biting lyrics still intact.



Experimental Hip-Hop took off in the 2010s. Of course, there are many influential artists to credit: Death Grips, MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, JPEGMAFIA, clipping., and definitely Shabazz Palaces. 

This resurgence is important when talking about the new Injury Reserve and Tirzah albums because both took the wackiest underground sounds of the past decade one step further.

Colourgrade (2021), Tirzah

I’ll start with the more approachable recommendation. Tirzah first impressed me with her 2018 album Devotion. In fact, I recounted my positive experience with it in my very first Olney contribution. Her music is a breath of fresh air, relatable but unique.

On her newest effort, she ventures further into the mystical. Devotion was dreamy, spacious, and emotional. If you study the concept of Chakras, you might say that it embodies the green, or Heart, Chakra.

Kanye once said that a deep rhythm section in music reflects the Sacral Chakra (orange), located above the groin: primal, sexual. 

Colourgrade finds itself moving in that direction, downward from the heart. Tirzah sometimes explores sounds of Heart and Crown (enlightenment). But often she’s moving downward on the spectrum. Perhaps that is because we’re all partially governed by our sexual desires. It’s in the DNA of life to survive, and to survive indefinitely is to reproduce. Or perhaps she’s reaching lower, to the Root, to a place of safety and security.

Her mix of emotions and unclear personal goals manifest as a liquid soundscape, constantly changing, manipulated with wavy effects drawn from exploratory music of the distant and not-so-distant past. 

Overall, Colourgrade isn’t too unconventional. R&B is the obvious foundation upon which it stands, and that’s what’s great. The roots are familiar, but the tree is something new, transformative, and a little hard to describe. Tirzah paints mostly with orange, but she’s dabbling in the whole palette. 

By the Time I Get to Phoenix (2021), Injury Reserve

Let’s get this out of the way: this album is not for everybody. Actually, despite Injury Reserve’s roots in Hip-Hop, fans of the genre may be the most turned off by Phoenix because it barely even qualifies as Hip-Hop. Sure, there is some rapping, but large swaths of the album go without vocals altogether. Even the auto-tuned singing feels less like mainstream Trap and Pop and more like an obfuscation of the audio akin to the other experimental elements of the music.

One twitter user said that Injury Reserve created a new genre altogether. What that genre is, I’m not sure. Some tracks are written in unusual and changing time signatures and feature dissonant guitar samples reminiscent of Noise or Math Rock. Others have low-fi synthesizers that somehow evoke melodic Grunge or Garage Rock guitar. And while the album does sound like little else I’ve ever heard, I can’t help but notice the influence of the my favorite weirdos Shabazz Palaces; both because of the wandering and sparse instrumental passages and also the shared ingenuity of both artists to take inspiration fearlessly from wherever they find it.

The album is dreary, for several reasons. In June 2020, band member Stepa J. Groggs passed away for undisclosed reasons. In interviews with the surviving members, it’s clear that the bond they share with each other and with Groggs is deep. Evidently, the music on the album was largely written before Groggs’ passing. After his death, the project was tabled until the remaining members (Nathaniel Ritchie and Parker Corey) decided to finish it. They stated that its bleak and reflective sound preceded the loss of their friend, but it only felt more appropriate afterwards. Even more so in these uncertain, pandemic-overcast times.

“Knees” is perhaps the most musically accessible track on the album, if only because of the soulful vocals. “My knees hurt when I grow. And that’s a tough pill to swallow, ‘cause I’m not getting taller.” The song itself is a tough pill to swallow. It’s somber and touches on a familiar feeling: a feeling that even after you’ve made changes to better yourself and the lives of those around you, you somehow don’t feel as though anything has improved. Groggs had struggled with alcoholism, and this mind state is particularly common among recovering addicts. Even after kicking a habit, re-establishing personal relationships, gaining better employment or picking back up your favorite hobby, you’re left thinking, “Is this it?” You know you’re better off than before, but it doesn’t seem that way for some inexplicable reason.

Frankly, “inexplicable” is a good word to describe By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Its purpose is unclear, its sound is murky, and for some listeners, its probably not enjoyable. But for Injury Reserve it’s about the journey, not whether you like the destination.

My essential picks from the boundary-pushing 2010s:

Shabazz Palaces: Black Up, Lese Majesty
(Both are genre-less masterworks full of social criticism and wit)

Death Grips: Exmilitary 

(My favorite from these Prog rappers. Not available on streaming, try Youtube or buying the music outright.)

JPEGMAFIA: All My Heroes Are Cornballs
(To me, it’s his best work. But Veteran, miscellaneous songs and EPs, and the shocking and challenging Communist Slow Jams are all incredible.)

THEESatisfaction: awE naturalE
(Spaced out, haunting R&B; the kind of genre exploration discussed earlier)

Billy Woods: Hiding Places
(True, grisly poetry about existentialism in urban America underscored by Kenny Segal’s profound, bare production.)

Slauson Malone: Slauson Malone A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018 (Crater Speak)
(A beautiful exercise in the abstract, made purely from samples.)

And one from 2003:

Cherrywine: Bright Black
(Starts with the lines, “Come in the place and trip, that’s what I’m talking about | Pour yourself a taste and sip, that’s what I’m talking about.”)