Fugees ‘Score’ Big With A Soulful Set Of Melodious Music

The Score Fugees (Ruffhouse/Columbia)

The score? Well, all you really need to know is that the Fugees win. This is the hip-hop album of the year.

Game, set, match.

Call us crazy (or premature, even), but it’s impossible to envision another album scoring higher than “The Score” in the next nine months. After all, the hip-hop landscape is becoming increasingly cluttered with narrow-minded soundalikes - urban cowboys (and girls) who seem to keep their eyes fixed on the cliched things in gangsta-rap and/or ghettocentric life while ignoring musical and lyrical innovation.

In this stagnant climate, the Fugees stand way out.

“The Score” is a sharp and soulful, engaging and thoughtful, progressive, cinematic and refreshingly melodious album that should appeal to both hip-hop purists who favor lyrical bite and rhythmic punch, and fans of tuneful, genre-stretching, socially conscious alternative hip-hop (De La Soul, Arrested Development, Digable Planets, PM Dawn, etc.).

Much like the Digable Planets, the New Jersey-based Fugees place a heavy emphasis on atmospherics and space: acoustic guitars bubble under the swinging beats; roaring auto engines and the sound of screeching brakes poke through for dramatic effect; muffled trumpets and moody keyboards and cellos wander across the soundscape, often filling space other groups would stuff full of samples.

The surreal result suggests urban paranoia - something the Fugees confirm when they defensively come out swinging at authority (the police, the U.S. Defense Department, Newt Gingrich, Big Brother, employers) and, later, complain about bad dreams and suicidal tendencies, saying that “it’s hard … to define peace of mind” in such a grim, violent world.

“If I should fall asleep/And death takes me away/Don’t be surprised, son/I wasn’t put here to stay,” the group offers over and over in the dark, spare, thought-provoking “Family Business.”

The centerpiece of the Fugees’ sharp, tuneful world is the talented Lauryn “L” Hill, who owns a supple and assured singing voice that places her near the top of the class of contemporary female R&B vocalists.