Gang Starr's 1990 effort 'Step in the Arena' is a masterpiece – jazz and hip-hop soldered together so cleanly that the line is invisible. Gang Starr's new album is, by comparison, a smaller effort, less swift and slightly tinged with nihilism. But Daily Operation is hypnotic and pensive – throbbing in a spare, intimate way.

Daily Operation is, in fact, a remarkably good sequel. Like Arena, it could easily be mistaken for a boastfest ("The Place Where We Dwell," "I'm the Man"), but DJ Premier and the rapper the Guru continually "Flip the Script" and segue into songs that careen and question, that calmly lambaste everything from the Persian Gulf War to the idea that the government created AIDS. All the lyrics are spoken in the same tone, an effect that leaves you wondering where the bullshit stops and the acid irony begins.

The music is muted – oblique in the way that understatement usually is. The violins on "Soliloquy of Chaos" are elegantly frantic as they frame the Guru's autopsy of a party aborted by a shooting. On the one song in which women are the point, "Ex Girl to Next Girl," the Guru is more hopeless than he was on Arena's "Love Sick." While the song could easily be heard as a chauvinistic tirade about the interchangeability of women, a closer listen reveals a look at the discouraging game of searching for love and the easiness of getting caught up in the idea of a person, rather than the person herself. That hopelessness carries over into "No Shame in My Game" as well: "But what the hell's success/If the mess ain't changing.... Stick up kids still stickin'/Nasty hookers still trickin'/All the pimps still pimpin'/All the crackheads trippin'/While the dealers still sellin'/So I'll refrain from the yellin' and the preachin'/Cuz who the fuck would I reach?"

The boasting on Daily Operation serves as a comic relief from this comment on the futility afflicting urban America. And to its credit, the compelling Daily Operation rises above most of the assembly-line, new-school hip-hop being churned out by most artists and labels – big or small – these days. (RS 634/635)

DANYEL SMITH