For years, the Ying Yang Twins found their musical, social and spiritual home in strip joints. Seemingly every track was about strippers and getting loaded, which isn’t a lot to base a career on, but if labelmate Lil Jon could make a career out of yelling, “Say what?” over the hip-hop equivalent of arena rock, they have to be considered verbose by comparison. For me, 2004’s United States of Atlanta was the Ying Yang Twins’ Sign O’ the Times—a diverse album that delivered more expansive thoughts and music than they had hinted was in them before. Evidently hip-hop fans liked the nasty “The Whisper Song” but not much else about the album, which brings us to the slightly confused Chemically Imbalanced.

 

In the opening, producer Mr. Collipark announces that half of the album is going to be for long-time fans and the second half is more experimental. That produces songs such as “1st Booty on Duty,” “Jigglin” and “Big Boy Liquor” in the first half, and in the second half, “Friday,” “Family” and “Leave.” Evidently “experimental” is code for “one-word titles.” The first half is what the Ying Yang Twins have traditionally delivered, and I find much of it funny in sublimely stupid way. In the boy-band-like “Take it Slow,” I can’t believe they wrote, “I want you to know / you’re the shit for sure” for the chorus and meant it seriously.

 

Aside from a slight change in subject matter, though, there’s little progressive or new in the second half. There’s no “Ghetto Classics” or “Long Time” (with Anthony Hamilton singing phrases from Al Green’s “Belle”) or “F*** the Ying Yang Twins,” all of which showed a subtle intelligence on USA beneath the superficial dumbness. Instead, they get Wyclef Jean joining their shtick for “Dangerous,” leaving Twins Kaine and D-Roc sounding unsure and a little uninteresting.

 

The Ying Yang Twins are still the most interesting of the crunk crowd. Lil Jon is fascinating in his ability to shout his way through an album with a 50-or-so word vocabulary (often using “crunk” as a noun, verb and adjective), but the Ying Yang Twins show signs of having some bigger ideas. Here it sounds like they’re too concerned with losing their core audience to express them.