Album Reviews

** Method Man, “Tical,” Def Jam. Once again, New York delivers a hard-core artist who can’t live up to his pre-album hype--this one part of last year’s rap darlings the Wu-Tang Clan. Not once does the rapper--who’s part of a rap package at the Olympic Auditorium on Friday--deliver something we haven’t heard before, or at least deliver it in such a way that we hear it anew. Even the beats aren’t especially memorable.

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