Fugees The Score Review: Great Singles, Great Singer, Uneven Album

The production credits are crowded, with the three members, Jerry Duplessis and a rotating cast that includes Salaam Remi, Diamond D, John Forté and Shawn King, yet the sound is remarkably consistent. Most tracks are built on sampled melodies, but live guitar, scratching and the group's own singing keep the surfaces human. Rather than stacking dense, dusty loops, The Score tends to leave space: a bass line, a drum break, one recognizable melody, then voices. That economy is why the singles still play on any speaker, and why the interludes and outros that frame them sound like part of one world rather than interruptions.

The sampling strategy is the album's most original move. Familiar material is used as a hook rather than as a joke: an Enya piece under a stern chorus, a Delfonics interpolation, a Teena Marie melody on the first single, a Roberta Flack song turned into a slow-burning ballad. The risk is that the borrowed melodies are what the casual listener remembers, and the original passages have trouble keeping up with them.

The three voices are distinct enough to carry a record. Hill is the strongest of them, a rapper and a singer with the same authority, and her rhythm makes even fast verses sound conversational. Wyclef Jean and Pras supply a looser, more comic energy, and the contrast among the three is the album's engine. The group's reggae background gives the hooks a melodic base that most rap records of the period lacked, which is why the singing never feels bolted on.

The writing is where the album is most uneven. The wit and the sense of community are strong when the group talks about its own situation, but there are stretches of boasting that feel generic next to the singles, especially on the crew-heavy cuts. Guest verses from the Outsidaz, John Forté and others add variety but little that advances the album's argument, and some of the interludes interrupt momentum instead of building it. The ambition to be a film is also what makes the weaker stretches feel longer than they are.

The mix is a final strength, and an underrated one. Drums hit with a dry, close weight, voices sit slightly forward, and the bass stays warm without swallowing the samples. That clarity, rather than any single beat or sample, is the reason the record has aged better than many of its more densely layered peers. It also means the weaker songs never sound cheap, only underwritten.

The tracklist is front-loaded in the way a hit album is. After a short spoken intro, the first half of the record delivers its singles and its best performances in quick succession, with an opening rap track, a run of strong mid-tempo songs and the cover that made the group famous all landing before the album reaches its midpoint. Ready or Not is the high point of that stretch, and the momentum it creates carries the listener through the next five songs without effort.

The sag starts after that. The title cut is a clever collage built from the rest of the record, but it arrives at the point where the album needs to push forward, and it slows things down. The next few tracks are competent, comfortable and low on tension, and the guest-heavy cut that follows brings new voices without adding a new idea. The group is at its most interesting when the three voices play off each other, and the back half has fewer of those moments than the front.

The ending recovers some ground. The cover of No Woman, No Cry is warm and affectionate, and the closing outro with scratching rounds out the radio-drama frame the group seems to want. At just over an hour for the main sequence, the album is longer than its ideas strictly require, and the three remixes and acoustic bonus track that follow on CD add little beyond a victory lap.

The sequence works best as a series of peaks rather than a single arc. If you listen from front to back, the album tells you who the Fugees were. If you shuffle, it tells you who they were at their best.

The Score is the Fugees' second and final studio album, and it is the one that makes the case for the group. It stands well above the earlier Blunted on Reality, which the fact sheet describes as a critical and commercial failure, and it is the obvious entry point because nothing else in their catalog competes with it. As a rap album it earns a score in the low 8s: great songs, a lead performance for the ages, real originality, and enough sagging in the second half to keep it short of the top tier.

It is for anyone who wants to hear how alternative hip-hop in the mid-1990s could be warm, melodic and radio-ready without losing its edge. It is also for fans of singer-rappers, of soul and reggae folded into rap, and of albums built from familiar songs reimagined. Skip it if you want dense lyricism from start to finish or a tight 40-minute statement; this is a loose, generous record, and its best moments are scattered across the first half.

It has aged well, because the sample choices and live touches avoid dating the sound to a single studio year, and the hit songs still sound current. Its streaming performance supports that: by the fact sheet's count it is among the most streamed 1990s hip-hop albums on Spotify. Start with Ready or Not, Fu-Gee-La and Killing Me Softly, then add Zealots if you want to hear Hill rap at full strength. After that, go to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill for the fully realized version of what she does here, and to The Low End Theory, the group the Los Angeles Times compared them to, for another take on relaxed, melodic rap. The Score is best remembered not as a perfect film but as the moment three people with very different strengths sounded like one band.