Artist: Beastie Boys
Label: Capitol Records
Release: 2011
Running time: 44:15
Rating: 4/5
Beastie Boys are the longest-living white hip hop incarnation on Earth. Even though they switched from the NYHC punk jurisdiction to hip-hop rhyming back in the mid-eighties, their studio albums are a real rarity. Whenever one drops, it’s a cause for a full-blown celebration, almost like hitting the jackpot in the lottery. Horowitz, Yauch and Diamond have finally brought their new studio effort to life. After all the stalling on “Hot Sauce Committee Part One”, we got “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” instead. Yep. So Part Two came out before Part One, and the devil only knows whether the band will become the first in rock history to one day release part one after part two.
Of course, that last sentence needs a short explanation of how things actually went down, the backstory behind the events that led to such a title for the first proper “rap” follow-up to “To the 5 Boroughs” from 2004. The record was originally announced for release on September 15, 2009, but the guys pushed it back after Adam Youch was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary gland. Luckily the tumor was benign, so Yauch came out of it okay. Well, as the release date kept slipping, the songs kept growing and changing. What’s more! Beastie Boys recorded material they were supposedly left with plenty of after picking the tracks meant for the first part, “Hot Sauce Committee”. So they actually jumped the gun on the release with a pre-release. It’s more than obvious that the band liked the new material a whole lot more than what was originally picked for the first part “Hot Sauce Committee”. Whether the material prepared for Part One will ever come out as an album is unclear. The guys do hint at a possible download of that material from their official website in the future.
The new album confirms that Beastie Boys are maturing. Across their records you can see a trend of increasingly sophisticated sound, but also more detail, deeper sonic structures and more layering. The guys have grown up artistically, in other words. Asking around for some riff, as was practically a constant on the studio debut “Licensed To III”, is pure utopia today. That they needed a complete turning point, a kind of “brainwashing” therapy, was confirmed by the stylistic leap to the fully instrumental album “The Mix-Up”, which, excellent as it was, even won a Grammy for best album in the “best pop instrumental album” category for 2007. The sonic leap was deepened by the excellent “Hello Nasty” (1998). Over the years, the “one-dimensional”, trivial, minimalist backing for the vocals has been replaced more and more by filling things out with the multilateral nature of the chosen samples and loops and thereby widening and enriching the very spectrum of the sound picture.
Beastie Boys still keep their feel for noise, they just don’t necessarily push it to the front. There’s an immense dose of clowning around here, an important element of the absolute recognizability of the musical groove they stay faithful to, diligently “watering and carefully nurturing” it. After a few seconds, the album opener raises a doubt because of an added sample, and it’s not entirely clear whether the guys are about to sail off into another instrumental album, but after ten seconds it suddenly becomes clear that the vocals are with us! Make Some Noise is a confirmation of what follows on the album. It keeps a genuine bond with the legacy of their records, while at the same time offering a new sound from a band that doesn’t stand still and keeps evolving. Aggression today is really caught only in the rapping. The drums in the rhythms still keep that metallic, diffuse sound, but it’s now wrapped in a much warmer, resonant bass-line culture, the kind the early albums, totally stripped of low tones, could only dream of.
In this new era, Beastie Boys are also much more delicate in distorting the rap lines. It’s not just about plain switches of rapping style between the three vocalists, but also about running the rap lines through all sorts of effects that warp the verses. That’s just one of the methods the band uses to achieve an extremely bold liveliness across the whole sonic structure of individual songs, and consequently an extremely dynamic flow of events and a constant, contrasting string of many moods.
And where might there still be a whiff of rock? The guitar clearly “digs in” on only two tracks of the new album, namely track five, Say It, which, with its aggressive delivery of barking “gang” rap lines and added scratching samples, vaguely recalls the band’s work from the album “Check Your Head” (1992). The outro of this track carries an incredibly funny ending that brings tears of laughter with its combined samples, while at the same time Beastie Boys prove what’s already been established. A tremendous sophistication that’s the fruit of maturing. The other such “rocker” touch is caught in Lee Majors Come Again (it opens with a suspicious “soundscape” that’s even similar to the ones fathered by Robert Fripp), where a riffy guitar link tastefully buddies up with a scowling bass guitar line. Yep. Here you can pick out a thread of the band’s punkish hardcore heritage. But in the mix it’s kept at a clear distance and doesn’t push in front of the rhythmic framework of the song or the way the vocals are delivered.
The guys lean toward a “dub” detour when they invite singer Santi White (Santigold) onto the album. It’s the most melodic track on the record, where the rapping is dosed next to Santi’s vocals merely as a passing spice (before the chorus). To Many Rappers, a song hewn in a similar way to the opening Make Some Noise, already came out in 2009 as a single with guest rapper Nas.
The album’s immensely entertaining little gem is Funky Donkey. Before the song of witty sampling even wraps up, there’s already a new cause for laughter called Tadlock’s Glasses. Let me mention that the Beasties originally wanted to title the album “Tadlock’s Glasses”. Tadlock was Elvis Presley’s driver, and Elvis supposedly gave him a pair of sunglasses on some occasion. So even the transitional bits within most of the songs come across as razor-sharp, and the Beasties never run out of a sense for genuine goofing around! Behind this apparent unseriousness, though, stands the firm, clear focus of cunning arranging, which demands finesse and a high degree of deliberation about where and when to use a certain sample, a certain motif, so that the fun principle reaches its optimal effect. Crazy A** S**t, with its added sample of kids babbling, is for instance the type of Beastie Boys piss-taking that you never want to end on the album.
The album cover slyly hides the juicy inside of the packaging, which is once again decked out in the band’s playful style, full of clowning. There’s no shortage of quickly sketched caricature figures on the sleeve, and this sharp-witted touch of visualizing the band’s spirit in 2011 is actually in line with the developmental point of the band’s musical language in this new era. A design Frank Zappa himself wouldn’t have hidden his enthusiasm for!
That Bestie Boys have grown into a band of broad musical receptiveness, with no limits on where they place their ideas, is also confirmed by the excellent instrumental Multilateral Nuclear Disarment, where the sophisticated side of the Beastie Boys coin pushes to the surface most. Logically, it also kept the most melody, since the rapping is missing from it.
With the new album, Beastie Boys keep a healthy beat of upward artistic maturing. The record clearly highlights a link to past works reaching right into the first half of the nineties, while “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” is at the same time a direct manifesto that Beastie Boys keep evolving and maturing musically. It sounds unique, expressively flexible, fresh, full of varied motifs and, most importantly, immensely fun and witty! It’s an album that all fans of the band’s musical epic will devour with pleasure, and then some. It’s a manifesto proving that the number one name in white hip hop justifies its greatness. Beastie Boys definitely don’t run out of expressive insight.
Lineup
Mike D – vocals, drums
Ad-Rock – vocals, guitar
MCA – vocals, bass guitar
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Money Mark – keyboards
Nasir Jones (Nas) – vocals on track no. 4
Santi White (Santigold) – vocals on track no. 7
Production
Beastie Boys
Track List
1. Make Some Noise (3:30)
2. Nonstop Disco Powerpack (4:09)
3. OK (2:49)
4. Too Many Rappers [New Reactionaries Version] (featuring Nas) (4:51)
5. Say It (3:25)
6. The Bill Harper Collection (0:24)
7. Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win (featuring Santigold) (4:11)
8. Long Burn the Fire (3:33)
9. Funky Donkey (1:56)
10. The Larry Routine (0:30)
11. Tadlock’s Glasses (2:19)
12. Lee Majors Come Again (3:43)
13. Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament (2:54)
14. Here’s a Little Something for Ya (3:08)
15. Crazy Ass Shit (1:56)
16. The Lisa Lisa/Full Force Routine (0:49)
