The artist formerly known as Butterfly…

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[6.14]

Iain Mew: “It’s a feeling” but it’s barely even that, drifting by without ever making an impact.
[5]

Anthony Easton: Is that a piano around 2:31? Because if it is, it foregrounds the rest of the track. The track itself is a little chaotic, a little confusing in places, the flow isn’t as strong as I was hoping and the details could do with a little more effort at isolating. As it is, there is not enough attention to detail paid.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Even granting that Shabazz Palaces’ fantastic album is not exactly primed to compete with Diplo-helmed chartbounds, this one is particularly resistant to anything but a well-earned headphone reverie. Note the bass, thick mix, and Ishmael Butler’s querulous timbre.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The track achieves weightlessness, which mitigates the drag of Ishmael Butler’s flow. The bass is nearly subliminal, the synthspace takes up the whole brain pan. It makes Butler’s nagging meter a real bummer by contrast.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The bass is bathymetric and the keys oceanic; the effect is of a song that rolls languidly along the horse latitudes. “The ship I came here on vanished,” raps Ishmael Butler, and his verse tips willfully into obscurantism for the most part. The coyness works, however, because, as the hook of sorts says, “It’s a feeling” — impressionism is the point. The sharpest, most interesting parts are when the lapping leaves behind coarse sediment: “I can’t explain it with words, I have to do it,” for instance, or “I slowed it down once; everyone was going fast/So I sped up, cause I ain’t the one to reach the end last.” As the words build momentum, so too does the melody — but still only intermittently. The song is one to be submerged in. I enjoy it the same way I do, say, DJ Sprinkles’s deep house inversions.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: It could be a bit clever for its own good; the music and the words are doing two different things and not in harmony. Ishmael Butler jerks me around and never lets me into the story he’s telling. The music, by contrast, is a soulful trance. I might even wish that the two ideas had ended up as two tracks, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t intriguing enough on its own; indeed, what seemed like a mismatch on the first listen just made me listen harder.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Takes forever to get going, and when it does never rises above a mumble. The fact that the mumble is pretty compelling isn’t quite enough.
[6]