It's so hard to be a sociopath nowadays. You have to have Dr. Dre's deadpan nihilism, or Kool G Rap's barely-contained fury, or Ice Cube's occasional flair for pathos, or a certain Caucasoid from Detroit's manic layering of personae. The stakes have been raised so high in the last couple of years, you can't just be a garden-variety deviant anymore. Everybody's gotta have a gimmick.

Give the Smut Peddlers point for trying. A bunch of smart-ass Caucasoids in their own right, the Peddlers are some of the New York underground's sickest puppies. Essentially the High and Mighty-- rapper Mr. Eon and producer/DJ Mighty Mi-- plus long-term 12" sicko Cage, the Peddler project shades the Mighty's goofball act a bit more darkly. The duo's first album was a charmer largely due to its almost-innocent snottiness. But influenced by Cage's horrorcore stylings, Porn Again ends up sounding frustratingly forced by comparison.

There are good moments here, but they mostly evoke the lighter touch these guys have already patented. "So many biters/ I perform in a shark cage" runs a not-atypical line, which, though funny, doesn't exactly gel with a lot of the darker material here. Cage claims to be "Shorty from The Shining/ All grown up, rhyming," but never manages to demonstrate convincing psychosis. Instead, he sounds like that funny stoner in the back of class cracking his friends up with the most messed-up images he can scrape from his resin-caked brain. He wants to have a three-way with the Olsen twins; he'll pay your girlfriend for sex; he is unkind to women.

At least Cage tries. Eon's big contribution to the World Dictionary of Perversions is having sex while watching Scarface. In fact, a lot of the Peddlers conceits sound like they've been nicked from movies. Cage even points out that he named his dog Kubrick, which further implies it's the kind of record the guys in Clerks could have made if they had an unexplained enthusiasm for underground hip-hop. Several verses could effectively be replaced with "Heh, heh/ You remember that scene in Clockwork Orange? That was rad." One of the album's skits involves a guy beatboxing along with porno movies-- not a bad encapsulation of the album's aesthetic. Unlike guest Kool Keith, the Peddlers can't cross the line to genuinely deranged. They just sound like dorks who think porn is funny.

Mighty Mi's beats manage to keep things semi-interesting; their dank, funky drawl cuts against the NYC gravel in the rappers' voices. On tracks like "Bottom Feeders," his stutterstepping programming and harsh horn samples get him damn close to anthemic. Too bad the forced tone of psychopathic perpetrating completely shorts the energy and malice he musters.

Awash in delusions of grandeur about their own ability to project danger, the Smut Peddlers end up sounding silly and feigned. There's not nearly the darkness necessary to muster that kind of effect. Guest rapper RA the Rugged Man, who looks a lot like distinctly un-hip-hop Vlade Divacs, nails the guys' real mission: "I'm a hero to weird little white kids." The Peddlers aren't so psychotic they don't know their real place in the universe. But if you step too far from the one-hitter and the magazines hidden under your mattress, they start to look pretty damn ridiculous.

-Sam Eccleston