The Score 1996 Album

Fugees

A few of these songs are too sample-heavy. This may be hypocritical given other songs I love, and a stupid statement given that sampling is one of the prominent aspects of hip hop, but the kind of criticism that was directed towards Puffy's 'I'll Be Missing You' can be directed at 'Ready or Not', 'No Woman No Cry' and Killing Me Softly'. On the latter, I remember really liking it back in the day, but spinning this album today, it fails by comparison to most of the other songs here. Except for that, 'No Woman, No Cry' is too unoriginal to rank it very highly, and the remixes don't come very close to matching the original. The rest of this though is either great or very good, with three distinctive members making up this group. I wish the brilliant 'Manifest' would have been its own individual track though. 4-3.5. Best Tracks: How Many Mics, Zealots, The Beast, Fu-Gee-La, The Score, Manifest