*1/2 Goodie Mob

STILL STANDING

(LaFace)

It's a very bad sign when a hip-hop crew include a dictionary of their own slang in the liner notes, but that's only the start of the problems with Goodie Mob's second album. The Atlanta quartet's debut, Soul Food, was a little uninspired on the rhyme side, but it had some of the weirdest, wildest music ever to be graced with raps and a perspective that owed a lot to old Southern blues.

Still Standing, however, buries the group's voices deep in the mix and heaps over-sweet harmonies and over-familiar beats on top. What little emerges from the murk is still content-free dealers-guns-and-money stuff, and it's especially annoying when the Mob fall into a lock-step Bone Thugs-N-Harmony style (exception: the profession of faith "Inshallah"). A lot of the disc sounds sweet in a booming system -- they've got the Southern-bass thing going on, and producers Organized Noize fill up the mix with detail -- but it gets samey over its hour-plus length. The group are known as a killer live act, though, thanks to the full-bore band behind them, and having real musicians back them up on a few tracks here helps a lot, especially the full-on rock epic "Just About Over."

-- Douglas Wolk<