Beastie Boys' 'Hot Sauce Committee Part Two' now streaming in full online: Read our review here
- Music
Ch-check it out: Due to some unauthorized rhymin’ and stealin’ (or more accurately, stealing of rhymes by lawless internet goblins), the Beastie Boys’ long-awaited Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is now streaming in full here.
The stream is accompanied by a note from the band explaining its appearance a full week in advance of Sauce‘s May 3 street date:
Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the “clean” version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version available for streaming on our site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony. Enjoy Kikoos for life!
Thank you, The Management
And without further ado, EW’s review–also to be found in this Friday’s print edition:
Beastie Boys
(Capitol)
In the ’80s and ’90s, hip-hop’s premier party advocates built a cache of seemingly infinite cool. But for the past 10 years, the Beastie Boys have been in limbo, turning out sleepy albums like 2004’s To the 5 Boroughs and dealing with Adam “MCA” Yauch’s cancer diagnosis. The spark of classic joints like 1992’s Check Your Head seemed like it might be gone forever.
Thankfully, Yauch is now in remission, and the group’s eighth album gets back to the business of being, to paraphrase their ’98 classic “Body Movin’,” sweet like a nice bonbon. Although the trio is now collectively 135 years old, the Boys don’t spend Sauce pondering their own mortality. They’re too busy laying down noisy, minimalist funk (the glitchy “OK”), rhyming former NBA star John Salley with Vogue editor André Leon Talley (“Here’s a Little Something for Ya”), and crafting a perfect reggae-kissed summer jam (the Santigold collab “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win”). And in case you forgot, the Boys are happy to remind you that there is a considerable amount of lyrical diesel left in their tank (“I’m running wild like rats in the Taco Bell,” declares Ad-Rock on “Long Burn the Fire”).
The Beasties get a lot out of a little, as most of these tracks are built around little more than 808 drum loops, some guitars, a couple of keyboard effects and a ton of reverb wrapping their voices in a sea of static. First single “Make Some Noise” forces a skronking organ groove to tap dance on some snare drums to groin-friendly effect, while “Say It” is the soundtrack to a robot dance battle.
There are nods to hardcore (the driving “Lee Majors Come Again”) and their sample-heavy work with the Dust Brothers (the chaotic, punchline-heavy “Crazy Ass S—“). Even the usually album-killing lounge-lizard instrumental (which took up the entirety of 2007’s The Mix-Up) sounds fresh and sharp: “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament” packs a surprisingly potent rhythmic undertow. And whatever the Boys are feeling, it’s apparently contagious; they manage to make Nas sound as engaged as he’s been in years on “Too Many Rappers.”
Hot Sauce is a lot like Daniel Craig’s übercool James Bond—another stripped-down return to a franchise’s best virtues after a decade or so of wandering the desert. It took a little time, but the Boys are back with a license to ill. A–
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