* 1/2 NKOTB, “Face the Music”; <i> Columbia</i>

They can run, but they can’t hide: It’ll take more than an acronym trick for those New Kids on the Block to pull the wool over our eyes.

“Face the Music” represents the vocal quintet’s bid at holding onto its old bubble-gum audience while moving boldly ahead toward earning its hip-hop “props.” The first few cuts, designed to establish NKOTB’s newfound street savvy, are particularly embarrassing: Dig the four-letter words and Public Enemy influences in the intro! Thrill as Donnie Wahlberg proves he was the brains behind Marky Mark in “Dirty Dawg,” in which they be dissin’ a ho, man!

Credibility thus established, the erstwhile Kids are freed to move on to much more palatable material for most of the album’s remainder--namely, ballad singing. They’re backed by the best tracks money can buy--via hit producers including Teddy Riley, Narada Michael Walden and Walter Afanaseiff--and succeed creditably at last in their adolescence-long quest to sound black. But in winning the battle, NKOTB may lose the war, because sounding black isn’t the same as sounding soulful, and the expertness of their emulation of up-to-the-moment R&B; vocal-group sounds only helps point up the futility of the whole exercise when they can’t make the important leap from basic harmonies to transformative melisma.

Banality, thy name is . . . considerably shortened now.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).