Boot Camp Clik

Boot Camp Clik has been together for nearly 15 years, and its members are separately responsible for hip-hop classics like Black Moon’s Enta Da Stage, Smif-N-Wessun’s Dah Shinin’, and the Fab 5’s “Leflaur Leflah Eshkoshka.” You can hear that history weighing down The Last Stand, its first collective album since 1996’s For the People. “Took it back to the basics/Mastered the matrix/BC crashing the station,” Sean Price rhymes on “Here We Come.” It’s one of 14 songs with a stolidly traditional framework, from the patchwork of head-nodding, boom-bap beats (by 9th Wonder, Marco Polo, and others) to the uniformly functional tag-team rhymes and hooks. The Last Stand isn’t bad, and Boot Camp Clik’s various members deserve respect for carving out successful indie careers after their mid-’90s heyday. But if they were more ambitious, their efforts wouldn’t sound as frustratingly conservative as this. 3 stars

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Boot Camp Clik plays Drunken Unicorn Fri., Aug. 11.