Send "Beastie Boys " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 It's hard to imagine pop culture in the 1990s without Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D. During those years, the Beastie Boys didn't sell the most records or grace the most magazine covers, but they brilliantly articulated how a constellation of obsessions-- early hip-hop, hardcore, trash culture, 70s TV, vintage sneakers, skateboarding, vinyl records-- could be pulled together into not just a coherent aesthetic but a way of life.Looking at their arc from a purely musical perspective, you could divide their career in half at the midpoint of that decade-- at some point between 1994's Ill Communication and 1998's Hello Nasty. Their first four full-lengths came in less than eight years, and during this stretch, they were hungry and on the move, restlessly searching for new avenues of music expression. They're just now getting to their third proper album (fourth, if you want to count 2007's instrumental LP The Mix Up) in the 17 years since. The Boys became men, and now they're gliding respectably into middle age, living honorable lives and playing music only if and when they feel like it. (This album was originally supposed to come out in 2009, but MCA has been battling cancer and the re-jiggered version was labeled Part Two.) They broke their ground, and now they have nothing to prove and no pop scene to become part of. Which means that they can focus on being the Beastie Boys, and let the fans decide if they want to engage with them on that level. In this case, being the Beastie Boys means returning to the thicker, heavier sound they ushered in with Check Your Head and Ill Communication. Hot Sauce Committee mixes live instrumentation and samples into the kind of soupy production first unleashed on the world with "Pass the Mic" and furthered with songs like "So What'cha Want" and "Sure Shot". It's a very different feel from 2004's To the 5 Boroughs, their post-9/11 love letter to New York that found them more or less stripping down and letting simpler beats and straight-ahead vocals do the talking. These songs are dense with sound effects and heavy on the bottom end, and the vocals are processed with a mixture of distortion and EQ that obscures the details of their rapping and the content of their lyrics but also gives the music a bit of snarl. They're good at this sound. The song titles suggest that the Beastie Boys feel comfort in their position, addressing culture that was already retro in 1986 ("Lee Majors Come Again"-- he was the Six Million Dollar Man, kids), paying tribute to the music of their youth ("Nonstop Disco Powerpack"), and offering a bit of inspirational uplift ("Long Burn the Fire"). These and other tracks reference earlier work in ways even more direct. "Lee Majors" is the latest in the line of "Remember, we used to be a hardcore band" songs that stretches back to their 1992 cover of Sly Stone's "Time for Livin'". "Long Burn the Fire" has vocals from all three, but starts off feeling like a "state of MCA" dispatch in the vein of "Stand Together" or "A Year and a Day", this time delivered with a touch of weariness. Both "Fire" and "Say It" have an overloaded end-of-bar sound effect that brings to mind "Pass the Mic", "Gratitude", and "Sabotage". And "Nonstop" once again has rhymes about macaroni and cheese and keeping on until the break of dawn. Other echoes from earlier songs abound, but you don't come to the Beastie Boys for something new, which is perfectly fine, even a little admirable. Beginning with Paul's Boutique, part of their appeal has been that they've built a little clubhouse in their G-Son studio and invited everyone inside. They've gone off on their own trip, returning to the same pop culture obsessions and building their own context rather than integrating into the musical world around them....full text |
| Rocksound |
| It might sound like a sequel but were it not for Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis, the Beasties would have released ‘Hot Sauce Committee: Part Two’ some 18 months back. Now that they’ve finally given up the goods, it’s easy to understand why they decided to go with what they already had because their eighth album is rooted firmly in hip-hop’s old-school. The New Yorkers do occasionally stray from the yappy rhymes / big-beats blueprint during tracks like the dub-reggae tinged Santigold collaboration ‘Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win’ but for the most part, ‘Hot Sauce Committee: Part Two’ is vintage, if not exactly essential, stuff....full text |
| Guardian |
| Not so long ago, it seemed as though the Beastie Boys might end up gently gentrifying away from frontline rapping. Well into their 40s, successful beyond their teenage punk rock dreams, they had families and interests to pursue other than "rocking the house till the break of dawn" (a Beasties lyrical staple for over 20 years). Buy it from Buy the CD Beastie Boys Hot Sauce Committee Part Two EMI 2011 There was Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz's acting, Adam "MCA" Yauch's film work and Tibetan activism, and Michael "Mike D" Diamond's wine blog. The Beasties' last album, 2007's The Mix-Up, had been entirely instrumental, quietly winning them a Grammy. The album that preceded it was 2004's To the 5 Boroughs, an emotional response to 9/11, the Bush administration and other tyrannies. It had its moments – the single "Ch-Check it Out", chiefly – but 5 Boroughs's sombre cast could easily have marked the end of the bratty outfit who emerged in 1987 fighting for their right to party. Lest we forget, these now genteel salt'n'peppered Buddhist sympathisers once toured with a giant inflatable penis, started riots and appalled the tabloids in the late 80s. And yet, quite unexpectedly, the Beasties are now releasing a party album that's as good as 1998's Hello Nasty. Originally scheduled for release in September 2009, the eighth album by the New York rap crew was delayed to allow MCA to undergo treatment for a tumour to a salivary gland. Heralded online by a typically mischievous video trailer, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two finds the Beasties on marvellously carefree form, scattering references to food, microphones, Bob Dylan, Lee Majors and other pop-cultural detritus as joyously as if the Dalai Lama had just kung fu'd the entire Chinese army in 360-degree slo-mo. "Make Some Noise" opens the album with a farty, rolling hook and the self-referential chorus of "We're gonna party for the motherfuckin' right to fight!" To modern ears, attuned to the radically different concerns and techniques of contemporary hip-hop, the Beasties' bouncy old school sound will seem downright prehistoric. While post-gangsta hip-hop bristles with murderous intent, the Beasties continue to stage verbal MC battles like it's 1985. Released in 2009 and reworked here, "Too Many Rappers" ropes in hip-hop institution Nas to sneer paternalistically at the calibre of wordplay nowadays, like a New York summit of grumpy old men....full text |
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