**1/2 Fun Lovin' Criminals

100% COLOMBIAN

(Virgin)

Imagine Curtis Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack remade in our cynical, irony-drenched era by three white guys and you'll have Fun Lovin' Criminals' 100% Colombian (the title refers to quality -- as in coffee, not coke, FLC insist in the press notes). More cohesive than the trio's spotty debut, Come Find Yourself, it's a mellow album of hard tales of street life delivered by rapper Huey with imperturbable cool over cocktail funk. The forced rhymes are often goofy (the chorus of "Korean Bodega" goes, "Korean Bodega/It's-a my fav'rite"), and the samples are judicious but loopy ("Big Night Out" borrows from both Tom Petty's "American Girl" and the Marshall Tucker Band's "Can't You See"). Still, the band are not without chops (listen to the nimble work from bassist Fast and drummer Steve on the otherwise absurd rockabilly bonus track, "Fistynuts"), and their taste in influences is hard to fault ("Love Unlimited" is an unabashed homage to Barry White, and B.B. King guests eloquently on "Mini Bar Blues"). Huey limns his portraits of New York characters with novelistic local color and detail, whether it's a recently released ex-convict ("Back on the Block") or an East Village drug connection ("10th Street"). If not for the record's blunt-smokin' groove, listeners might even be tempted to contemplate.

-- Gary Susman