Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is the Beastie Boys' eighth album. Their wizard blend of goofy creativity and deft discipline ensures that the best tracks here are simultaneously scattershot and focussed – like the way Too Many Rapperscooks up mean funk from Space Invaders noise and cranium-crushing low-end (and throws in a guesting Nas), or how Say It pulls nagging hooks from abstract feedback drones and then welds them to subterranean bass grooves that could level mountains, before collapsing into stoned synth doodles that’ll amuse all but the terminally dreary.
On paper, both are messes; but on record they make canny sense. The sound of the Beasties here is catnip for those who still revere their late 80s/early 90s output: vocals are drenched in reverb like a hippie dabs patchouli, while the tracks fuse live instrumentation and samples with a simpatico they’ve perfected since Check Your Head, delivering tracks alive with ideas and chaos and funk and noise and groove, dense enough to get lost in for at least a summer.
They don’t shy away from pop moments, though: OK has a dippy new wave catchiness evoking Ad-Rock’s BS 2000 side-project – it’s as infectious as crabs – while the dub-a-delic Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Winhas Santigold playing straight-woman to their Marx-Brothers-of-Rap lunacy with an aplomb that could own the charts if the weather stays balmy.
