Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 02/07/07
Label: Capitol

New York City's Beastie Boys must have led one of the most charmed and productive lives of any hip hop affiliated group ever. Starting as a hardcore skate punk outfit in the mid-'80s before hitting onto a novel rock rap crossover sound, fusing PC-baiting lyrics with dope beats and raging rock guitars courtesy of Rick Rubin at Def Jam. But even though the public at large saw them as more novelty than novel, they still managed to quietly reinvent themselves as crate diggers extraordinaire with the sampladelic "Paul's Boutique", and the rest, as they say, is history.

The trouble is the Beastie Boys were such tastemakers in the 1990s, recording landmark albums like "Check Your Head" and launching their Grand Royal magazine that now, viewed from a distance, their world of cheesy cop shows and a penchant for golf wear make them seem as anachronistic and naff as wearing an afro wig and going to a '70s disco. And tellingly their first serious misfire was their first album this decade, the lukewarm "To The Five Boroughs".

So even though it's not a first (1996's French fan club release "The In Sound From Way Out!" was a compilation of mid-'90s instrumentals) this completely 'live' studio album of funk jams with no vocals feels like an attempt to do something completely different. Instead of the dizzyingly good and slightly rambunctious wordplay of yore we have a totally sample and electronics free record that sounds like it's been recorded in a handful of takes with little or nothing in the way of overdubs. The trouble is. however, that "The Mix-Up" is terrible.

Not even the presence of Money Mark, their long time keyboardist and percussionist Alfredo Ortiz, can save this raggle-taggle collection of lame ass-'70s pastiches. Adam 'Ad Rock' Horovitz' guitar work on "14th Street Break" is particularly lame with him hitting bum notes galore. Perhaps the Beasties imagine themselves being sampled in the future like they're passing on the baton to a future generation of rap artists. Well, perhaps, after all, there are plenty of cheap quantising programmes out there now that can make even the worst drumming sound in time. Even when a really killer groove gets going ("Off The Grid") they just don't have the skills to maintain it.

From badly played lounge funk, to porno grooves, to sitar-led breakbeats, this album doesn't surprise or satisfy at all. In fact, Yahoo! Music would swap this entire album for a single second of the pristine "License To Ill".

    by John Doran