A new Beastie Boys record is always something to celebrate, certainly to this critic, who tends to break out into choruses of “The Beastie Boys, they are, they comin’ home / They comin’ home, oh, they comin’ home”, which fans will recognise from their 1992 track, The Biz vs the Nuge.
But when it has been four years since the last Beastie Boys album, the Grammy Award-winning instrumental collection The Mix-Up, and seven years since the last Beastie Boys album to feature the MC skills of MCA, Ad-Rock and Mike D, then a new Beastie Boys album is definitely something to crow about.
Hot Sauce Committee Part Two hit the streets last week to much fanfare and justifiably so because it is the best thing the band has recorded since 1998’s Hello Nasty.
However, fans will need to revisit the band’s 1992 album, Check Your Head, and 1994’s Ill Communication to find the roots for the new album, because the Beastie Boys have headed back towards the dark, dense slabs of sound that were introduced on those two earlier albums. But they have updated it with a dose of 21st-century gloss.
It is cheeky, brash and will have your feet stomping and your toes tapping forever and a day. Or, as the Beastie Boys would have it, “on and on till the break of dawn”.
Scuzzy, thumping bass line
So let’s get down to the brass tacks of the album.
The highlights are too many to mention — but that’s not going to stop me from mentioning a few.
The opening track, Make Some Noise, kicks in with a scuzzy, thumping bass line and Ad-Rock declaring the opening salvo: “Here we go again, give you more, nothin’ lesser.”
The track develops into a banging jazz-funk monster as the Beasties trade rhymes over the top in what is one of the best album openers they have ever recorded.
Don’t Play No Game that I Can’t Win offers a dub-drenched little number with guest artist Santigold slipping in and out between the three Beasties and Lee Majors Come Again sees the band returning to their hard-core punk roots, which they used so judiciously on Check Your Head and Ill Communication.
Crazy Ass Shit is a banging party starter in the mould of Body Movin on the album Hello Nasty and Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament is a funky instrumental piece that will have fans of the instrumental album In Sounds from Way Out in fits of joy. But the track that has made the largest impression on me so far is Say It, which comes on strongly, like a darker, hard-nosed cousin of Root Down from Ill Communication.
If the Beastie Boys have ever occupied a piece of your musical heart, then make sure you get your hands on Hot Sauce Committee Part Two — it will kick-start any party in 2011 worth being at. And let’s hope that Hot Sauce Committee Part One sees the light of day soon too.