Bone Thugs-n-Harmony BTNHResurrection

The biggest structural change from the group's earlier records is the beat team. Where the previous albums leaned heavily on a single producer, this one credits Jimmy "JT" Thomas, LT Hutton, Darren Vegas and DJ U-Neek. In theory that should widen the palette. In practice it widens it by a modest amount. The beats are tidy, slow-to-mid-tempo and built to cradle the harmonies, with a darker, harder edge than the group's softest singles, but they share a general temperature. That consistency is a strength when the hooks are good, and a weakness when they are not, because there is rarely a drum pattern or a bass line loud enough to rescue a middling chorus.

The delivery remains the album's strongest asset. These voices overlap and trade lines so smoothly that a four-minute song can feel like a single long phrase. When the group is locked in, the music has a physical quality, a rolling, breathless forward motion that rap rarely achieves. Bizzy Bone's presence throughout adds a jagged counterpoint: his fast, shifting flows keep the more relaxed songs from settling into a rut. Set against the West Coast tradition of laid-back, bass-heavy hooks and sparse rapped verses, this is a different approach, more vocal and more athletic,.

The writing is the weaker half. The themes are the usual ones: street survival, loyalty to the crew, suspicion of outsiders, faith and struggle, and a song about weed. Each is competently handled, but few verses contain a specific image or story that stays with you. A track like "Weed Song" sounds relaxed and good-natured, and also thin on content. The few songs with a stronger concept, such as "Resurrection (Paper, Paper)" and "Change the World," stand out precisely because the others lack one.

The guest list is small, which is a good decision, since the group's own voices are enough variety. David's Daughters appear on one cut, and Big B appears on another. Neither changes the character of the album. The interpolation on "Don't Worry" is a good example of what the beat team does best: it borrows a soft, soulful hook and builds something smooth on top, which suits the group's melodic strengths.

The main flaw is the lack of risk. A group this technically gifted could have used the extra producers to push into stranger territory, a faster pattern here or a more skeletal beat there, and the record would have gained a dimension it currently lacks. Nothing on the record is a mistake, and almost nothing is a gamble either.

BTNHResurrection is the group's tidiest album in terms of length, and that works in its favor. After the sprawl of the previous double album, fifteen tracks feel tight, and the sequencing reflects that. The record opens with its darker, more aggressive songs, building a confrontational mood in the first third, and then relaxes toward a run of singles in the second half, which is a sensible shape for an album that wants both street credibility and radio presence.

The opening stretch is effective. The first few tracks set a hard, slightly menacing tone, and the group sounds focused. The momentum holds for a while, then softens in the middle, where several songs in a similar mid-tempo mode follow one another without much contrast. The sequence needs a change of pace here, a faster track or a more unusual beat, and it does not get one. The effect is not boredom so much as a kind of comfortable plateau, where the songs are individually fine and collectively indistinct.

The back half recovers because the best-known songs are clustered there. A run of the singles gives the album a second peak, with melodic hooks and clearer concepts, and the closing track sends it off without fuss. This is a smart ordering, because it leaves the listener with the group's strongest material fresh in their memory.

The length is earned, more or less. The album is not padded, and it does not outstay its welcome the way the earlier double album did. But it also lacks a true centerpiece, a song that justifies the whole thing on its own. The peaks are pleasant hills, not mountains. A listener who plays it front to back will have a good, consistent hour, and will probably remember the same four or five songs afterward.

In the group's catalog, BTNHResurrection sits clearly below E. 1999 Eternal and roughly level with The Art of War as a record that is easier to admire than to love. The 7.9 for the earlier record reflects a group at full creative stretch, with a sense of invention that this album does not quite match. This one scores 6.3: a competent, well-performed record with good singles and a narrower range. The relative order is deliberate, and it comes down to ambition. E. 1999 Eternal sounded like a new idea, and this sounds like a skilled reprise of one.

It has aged gracefully in one respect. The vocal blend still sounds unlike anything else, and the best songs have lost none of their appeal. In another respect it has aged less well, because the darker, more cautious production does not stand out in the way the group's earlier, stranger sounds did, and the general feel is of a very good record from a period of transition.

This album is for fans who already love the group and want more of the vocal style, and for listeners who prefer a compact record to a sprawling one. It is not the best starting point for someone new to the group. A new listener will get more from the earlier records, which have the same voices at a more inventive moment.

If you only have time for three songs, start with "Resurrection (Paper, Paper)," "Change the World" and "Can't Give It Up." They represent the concept-driven side, the melodic side and the groove-driven side of the record, and together they make the best case for it. After that, go back to E. 1999 Eternal for the full-strength version of the group's sound, and then to The Art of War for the long, ambitious double album that came between the two. BTNHResurrection works best as a postscript to those: an accomplished reminder that these voices were hard to replace.