The Beastie Boys have always flirted with instrumental music. Either to remind us that they aren’t just three white rappers from Brooklyn but pretty good musicians as well or to simply flesh out and give breathing space to their wordy rhymes on classic 90′s albums Check Your Head and Ill Communication. Hidden amongst the Sabotage‘s and the Pass The Mic‘s were jazz grooves and wah wah ridden funk, and splashes of 70′s styled hammon organ. So successful were those instrumentals that the Beasties even released a compilation of them in 1996; The In Sound From Way Out. Arguably for obsessive fans only, it still stands as a damn fine instrumental album to this day.

So, back to the present day and the Beastie Boys’ latest offering. The Mix Up is their first album of entirely new instrumental material. From the first track B For My Name things seem pretty promising with Mike D’s breakbeats and MCA’s driving, funk-tastic bass lines driving the beats along whilst Ad Rock and Money Mark smooth things out with guitar and keys respectively. Nothing has changed in the eleven years since The In Sound, the funk is still here, its still retro and it feels oh so good. The problem is, after a while, everything starts to get a little repetitive. As your attention span dwindles the album becomes one big slab of background music. The Mix Up is the sound of a band flexing their musical muscles, and after 25 years together who can blame them? But they have always been defined by their lyrics and an album without them ultimately ends up sounding lost and directionless. Music for BBQ’s and/or completists only.
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Links:
The Beastie Boys [official site] [myspace]