Ultramagnetic MC's - The Four Horsemen 2xLP

Wild Pitch (1993)

Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for twenty-five plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.

A few weeks ago I wrote about picking up a bootleg version of the second Ultramagnetic MCs album, Funk Your Head Up.  It was spaced out on two LPs and sounded much better than the old single LP version I've been dragging around for a while.  That motivated me to start looking for a newer version of the Four Horsemen LP.  I had this already, but my copy was a little bit worn and didn't sound so hot.  I had bought it off eBay or Discogs or something like that quite a while ago, but the condition just wasn't up to par.

So, I stumbled across this copy on eBay that was still sealed.  The cover art was a little beat up (and unfortunately the art on my other copy is a cut out, so it's only marginally better), but having two pristine slabs of vinyl was something I just couldn't pass up.  And man-oh-man does it sound wonderful.

It's hard to rank those first three Ultramagnetic albums.  They're all so different and have elements about them that are superior compared to the others.  I probably will always like Funk Your Head Up more, because I heard it first, but Four Horsemen is definitely a more consistent album start to finish. This is an album where these guys are just embracing their weirdness, making no play at all for crossover appeal and just throwing down off kilter rhymes over tremendous beats. 

In my opinion you really need to own all three of the first Ultramagnetic MCs albums.  They're all perfect in their own way and it's kind of a crime that the second two have been out of print for about a thousand years now.  A new, fancy version of Critical Beatdown just came out (Yeah, I'll be writing about that one pretty soon).  Hopefully that will spark demand for equally fancy reissues of their other golden era classics.

Ultramagnetic MCs - The Four Horsemen:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_myhlhqQi_cZ_DTo19FUzIWPJPeEBb-pUk