Photographer: Zach Wolfe.

Boyz n Da Hood representative Gorilla Zoe spreads his wings on his sophomore LP, DON'T FEED DA ANIMALS on Bad Boy South. While his 2007 debut WELCOME TO THE ZOO was built largely on gritty hood anthems, the ATL native gets stylistically adventurous this time--crooning his hooks and rhyming through the vocoder auto-tuner on the majority of the album cuts. There's still plenty of street here though as Zoe passes the mic to Rick Ross and Kollosus on the furious posse cut "What It Is," rhymes along porn star-turned-rapper Roxy Reynolds on the super-raunchy "Talk Back," and delves into paranoid introspection on the nihilistic trap-rap dirge "Lost." Beats come courtesy of Drumma Boy, Kane Beatz, Zaytoven, and Don Vito.

With his coarse voice and claim to be "A-Town's Hannibal," rapper Gorilla Zoe came on the scene as a fine alternative to Rick Ross. His breakthrough single, the thug anthem "Hood N****," made perfect sense, but then a guest shot on Yung Joc's quirky hit "Coffee Shop" seems to have knocked something loose. At its best, his sophomore release Don't Feed Da Animals is a bold, "Coffee Shop"-inspired attempt to try something different within the realm of gangsta rap. At its worst, it's redundant, or more likely, cringe-worthy. While "Hood Clap" and the handful of other attempts to re-create "Hood N****" are easy enough to ignore, it is tracks like "S*** on 'Em" that really hurt with their "I doo-doo/I pooh pooh/I s*** on 'em" choruses. Elsewhere "They give me no answers/Following the wise/But they're walking in Pampers" drags down "Lost," a heartfelt song about loneliness that would work splendidly if it wasn't for the diaper talk. Things heat up in the second half as "Man I" does the Mike Jones and "Back Then" thing in style. Then there are the three Drumma Boy productions, two of which -- "I Got It" and "Watch Me" -- are the usual club crushers, hook-filled and infectious as always. It's their third collaboration, the ambitious, Akon-sized closer "Echo," that really satisfies and makes the listener wish the previous set of admirable but flawed tracks had been given one more rewrite, preferably with fewer references to doo-doo and pooh. ~ David Jeffries