A Tribe Called QuestBefore this album A Tribe Called Quest seemed as dead as Gene Wilder, the star of a "too soon?" sample that closes album opener The Space Program. "Who can come back years later and still hit the shot?" Phife Dog asks on We The People... It's a dangerous question. For a crew whose sound more or less defined the 1990s, a comeback like this seems ill advised.
Mobius is the best example of how that risk is managed. Rather than reheated leftovers, it's a risky, forward-looking experiment. The track is a twisting serpent nodding in the direction of two decades of genre-defining rap from Madvillain to Yeezus. But perhaps the greatest test of the relevance of this record - its newness - is how comfortably current artists fit in. When Anderson .PAAK pops up on Movin Backwards or when Kendrick surprises us on Conrad Tokyo, it's a thrill but not a shock.
Energy, too, reigns supreme. Q-Tip on Black Spasmodic sounds like he's never been as excited to be making rap music. And there's great theatre. Lost Somebody drops out into silence and returns with unearthly guitar noodling that again returns to close out Conrad Tokyo. Solid Wall Of Sound sees Phife, Tip and Busta Rhymes chucking on accents and engaging in some wild, harmonic back and forth.
The only thing that dates the record, really, is the sound of our host's voices; not something they can help! The balance feels very much a product of 2016. Indeed, it feels like one of its best.
