The Four Horsemen

by John BushUltramagnetic's final album featured the foursome trying to balance Kool Keith's bizarro battle raps with the kinds of beats and rhymes that would put them in company with other East Coast groups like Gang Starr or EPMD. Surprisingly, The Four Horsemen was largely a live album, with a studio band attempting to reconstruct the classic hip-hop structure. Unfortunately, most of the results were muddy productions with little more than a stray brass line or two over the drummer's pedestrian East Coast beats. Only the opener, an instant classic named "We Are the Horsemen," approached the eccentric but head-nodding genius of their early material, though a few other tracks did feature interesting ideas: "Saga of Dandy, the Devil & Day" took a look at black baseball. Most of the other tracks should've been delegated to demo territory, with Kool Keith often reduced to endless repetitions of banal, baffling lines like this gem: "See that man on the street?/Who's at the corner, yeah!"