Del tha Funkee Homosapien & Tame One: "We Taking Over"

On the surprisingly tight Del and Tame One collaborative disc Parallel Uni-verses, Parallel Thought kicks a dozen spry, lush beats and lets the emcees sound like exactly what they are: slept-on vets. (Okay, it’s hard to call Del exactly slept-on—I remember in high school kids wondering who that dude on “Clint Eastwood” was—but compared to, say, MF Doom, another underground emcee with an unerring mic presence, Del’s discography looks underwhelming. We should not still be clinging to Deltron 3030 as a semi-high point, right. Anyway.) The grown-man hip-hop of Parallel Uni-verses settles into a particularly nice groove in its back half, particularly the day-drunk wistfulness of “We Taking Over,” which is the exact sort of back-in-the-day reminiscing this comeback album should be avoiding like a Guru verse. Fortunate, then, that Parallel Thought sets the emcees in an amber-tinted summer cool full of clarinets and nightbreathing samples, made live by a couple precision-point drum hits. Each takes a turn at the mic, Tame finally just admitting the track’s impetus—“Lately, this whole past decade ain’t amaze me”—and Del emphasizing the conversational qualities of his flow to the point that the verse feels on some back-porch, cigarette-break type of shit. And without sacrificing the track’s winsome mood, Tame’s outro is a brash, chest-thumping assertion of things, at once yearning for an era crystallized in memory and lamenting that its lionization renders its passing complete. The august strings sigh alongside, and through sheer artistic honesty the track becomes almost incidentally, but thrillingly, relevant.