Click to play

Behold, local avant-hiphop group Shabazz Palaces makes mystical, musical dream theater set at night in the Central District.

"Capital 5..." (fully titled "Capital 5, recorded after hrs at the gun ballad resource cntr on s Sweeper st.") starts with a calm beat and a repeated mantra-promise to be "a bright light / on the dark side of town." It quickly turns into dead-serious raps about gunplay in the Central District. One unshakable image has the narrator and a buddy driving through town "like ghosts," high on cocaine, possibly possessing a weapon. It ends in a low-key sprawl with more mantra-chanting and a shifting, two-part outro.

The energy of the track is seething, overtired, dangerous. There's a bohemian feel in the structure of the song and MC Ishmael Butler's abstract rapping style, but street-level gangsterness in his lyrics and those of the song's other rapper, a man who I believe goes by Silk.

Let it be known "boho-gangster" is not an established hiphop genre. Shabazz Palaces is in new territory with its gun talk and atmospheric rain sticks.

A note about Butler's sense of neighborhood iconography: It is keen. Previously, we've seen him rapping in front of the Grocery Outlet on MLK and Union, co-starring in a video that depicted the store with wide-lens epicness. On "Capital 5..." he floats past "old-head Africans" at the Starbucks on 23rd and Jackson, a place legendarily known to many as "the jazz Starbucks."

Photo from Rutlo