Fugees - The Score • CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

"Ready or Not" and "Fu-Gee-La." The album is sequenced like a movie, with spoken intros and outros, and sometimes-belabored skits (the Chinese-restaurant bit is a discomfiting misstep). But with the intoxicating sway of the grooves, and the dynamic zigzagging between tough chatter and Hill's striking vocal breaks, The Score plays better as the mix tape of your dreams. And that's more than enough to compensate for a trip-up like Hill's bizarre boast and off-color toast to one of America's great black female singers in "Ready or Not": "So while you be imitating Al Capone/I be Nina Simone/And defecate on your microphone." There had to be a better way to put it. (RS 750/751)

DAVID FRICKE