The Four Horsemen

When Ultramagnetic MC’s put out the compromised, label-meddled (yet still potent) Funk Your Head Up in ’92, many of the hardcore heads who’d waited 3 ½ years for a proper follow-up to their cult classic debut Critical Beatdown came away disillusioned that the long-absent group had failed to capitalize on the opportunity to rule golden era NYC. They took just over a year to make up for it with third album The Four Horsemen, but it wasn’t the drastic reversal of fortune that afforded the notoriously underheralded innovators a spot on the throne — more like a one-album stint on Wild Pitch that preceded a decade-plus breakup/hiatus. Still, it’s as close as they ever got to a return to form, and in retrospect it feels like a moment of satisfying closure before Kool Keith went solo and took his irreverent Afrofuturism into even further-flung turf. There’s even a bit of a glimpse of a potential new direction — a handful of cuts produced by Keith’s Cenobites production partner Godfather Don (“Checkin’ My Style,” “Raise It Up,” and “See the Man on the Street”) skew a bit moodier in their Beatminerz-caliber noir-jazz stylings, though you can find some rays of light piercing the cloud cover on the Negro Leagues tribute “Saga of Dandy, the Devil & Day.” Ced-Gee’s more straightforward gut-punch boom-bap sounds revitalized, too, and so does his beat-dekeing voice. “Two Brothers with Checks (San Francisco, Harvey)” positions him as every bit a shit-talking weirdo (“Supercat chasin rats with chemicals at the bottom/I’m givin’ gold with enzymes, connections I got ‘em”) as Keith in Rap Game Satchel Paige mode, and he ensures that “Bring It Down to Earth” does anything but as his verse describes his production and engineering technique as a kind of advanced atom-splitting super-science. Meanwhile Keith maintains his greatness as an entity of pure iconoclasm, building an entire herky-jerk flow around a Jimmy Two Times-esque repetition of line-ending words (“One, Two, One, Two”) and making everyone else’s boasts/threats sound as disposable as Dutch guts (“Raise It Up”; “Time to Catch a Body”).