Always wanting quick returns on artist advances, the music business often behaves like the banking business. In this commercial atmosphere, it's rare for a label to promote an album after more than a year if it isn't massive. Yet that's exactly what East West is doing with Chain, the second effort by the Family Stand.

Chain pairs postmodern thrust with retro detailing, goofy lyrics with serious messages. Its rich contours and blackadelic shades – ranging from R&B to rock, gospel to pseudo jazz bop – make it an oasis in the desert of post-hip-hop half-stepping. It's refreshing that Chain wasn't shamelessly shunted like the group's last project, Chapters: A Novel by Evon Geffries and the Stand, from 1988.

With a remix by Soul II Soul's Jazzie B, the first single from Chain, "Ghetto Heaven," became a hit on urban radio last fall. That track is a bonus cut on the Chain CD, but the original version contains much of the funky-drummed sparkle displayed on the twelve-inch – a dry, frisky beat set against urgent vocals and dramatic synth fills. Trading phrases in the manner of Sly and the Family Stone, vocalists V. Jeffrey Smith, Sandra St. Victor and Peter Lord discuss addictions to love, drugs and religion in such curious juxtapositions as "Nana likes her brandy/Especially peach/She keeps by the radio/And listens to the reverend preach." The themes of dependency and breaking compulsive patterns are explored elsewhere on Chain. There's the hushed instrumental "Ovasaxed" and the wild pitch "Avenue Lust," the milky "Last Temptation" and the ballsy "Little White, Little Black Lies."

That last track takes up racial ignorance, something the Family Stand deals with daily. A black band building one nation to dance us out of constrictions, the group is committed to the cause of erasing musical apartheid. As "Sweet Liberation" declares: "I will not stop before my destination/Sweet, sweet liberation." The Stand is on a mission, and maybe this time around it will be accomplished. (RS 606)

HAVELOCK NELSON