My Homies, Pt. 2

by David JeffriesOver-releasing like he was Master P with bills to pay, Scarface didn't even let one month of 2006 pass before he followed the excellent One Hunid with the guest-star-filled My Homies, Pt. 2. To put some confusion to rest, One Hunid was a "Scarface presents" affair -- that is, he was presenting his new crew, the Product -- but it contained much more material from Scarface himself than My Homies, Pt. 2, which looks more like a solo album than it is (longtime fans are less confused, because the original My Homies was also a near-compilation). With that out of the way, My Homies, Pt. 2 is better than its predecessor and would be every reason a Scarface fan needs to celebrate if it didn't draw attention away from the superior One Hunid by proximity. After Z-Ro and Ice Cube help Scarface set things off with the club banger "Definition of Real," Beanie Sigel and the Game join the man for the solid "Never Snitch." From here on in, Scarface bows out just about every other track, but if the listener accepts the album as a compilation, there's plenty of solid material left. Z-Ro's "Man Cry" is a heart-wrenching classic, perfectly complementing Scarface's own tales of bleakness and struggle. Skip and the Ghetto Slaves revive the beat from Mike Jones' slept-on "Cutting" for the party-starting "We Out Here" while Lil' Flip, Chamillionaire, and Bun B have a hood anthem on their hands with "Platinum Starz." Bouncing between the slick and the dirty, the bleak and the bravado, My Homies, Pt. 2 still hangs together well, and with little filler to suffer, only those who want an album of entirely Scarface are going to be disappointed.