Keven's Music Review: BEASTIE BOYS – Hot Sauce Committee Part 2

The Beastie Boys have never followed the norm by any means so for me to judge them by experimenting too much on their new record seems ignorant. I'm going to do it anyway and be the bad guy here by coming right out and saying it. Aside from one or two tracks, Hot Sauce is boring.

'Hot Sauce Committee Part 2' comes out before Part 1, which is ok with me. I can handle absurdness like that, but I can't handle 2 minute filler segway tracks that lend nothing on their own as 'songs'. There's a lot going on here and the Beastie Boys are dipping into the vault of oddities for their samples. When it works, it's amazing. Songs like 'OK' (which is my favorite), 'Lee Majors Come Again', 'Too Many Rappers' and 'Make Some Noise' are delicious. But when they're lumped into a package as distorted as this one, they get lost in a sea of oversampled chaos.

The rhymes are all on par with some of the trio's best work. We have oldschool and nerdcore throughout but we also wind up with wasted cuts like tiny kid voice sampling tracks under the banner of 'Crazy Ass S***'. Its tracks like that which take away from the experience. I should have expected a diverse album and it's hard to pick apart a group that turns out odes to Run DMC one track and then blasts out a hardcore rock song all on the same record.

'Hot Sauce Committee Part 2' was not as memorable as the guys' last album 'To the Five Boroughs'. If you're a hardcore fan of the guys I'm sure you'll agree I'm way off point, but as a casual listener I wasn't as entertained this go-around. I'm not a fan of distorted samples that end up ruining what could have been a semi-interesting track. Listen to 'Tadlock's Glasses' and tell me I'm wrong. I'll likely overplay 'OK' for the rest of 2011 but the rest of the record will mostly be ignored on my ipod and that's never a good sign.

1."Make Some Noise"
2."Nonstop Disco Powerpack"
3."OK"
4."Too Many Rappers" [New Reactionaries Version] (featuring Nas)
5."Say It"
6."The Bill Harper Collection"
7."Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win" (featuring Santigold)
8."Long Burn the Fire"
9."Funky Donkey"
10."The Larry Routine"
11."Tadlock's Glasses"
12."Lee Majors Come Again"
13."Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament"
14."Here's a Little Something for Ya"
15."Crazy Ass S***"
16."The Lisa Lisa/Full Force Routine"