The Beastie Boys - The Sounds of Science
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Free Music Notes for The Sounds of Science
Free Music Review: Some serious crap on this filler-album
Hit: 2 Stars
I've deleted at least ten of the crappier songs from my MP3 rip of my CD. Damn - regretting that I bought this one now for *sure*.Free Music Review: A collection of all things Beastie.
Hit: 4 Stars
I'm beginning to wonder if this really is the last release from these guys. Either way, it's 2 cd's full of rap, punk, hits, funk, rare tracks, and anything else they could have thrown on. As huge as it is, and all over the place musically, I wonder if it's too much. I mean it's great, but I think the casual fan might have enjoyed one disc full of the hits they would expect: "Fight For Your Right To Party", "Pass The Mic", "Sabotage", "Intergalactic", and so on. Or I think one disc of "hits", and one disc of extras would have made more sense. But overall, this is a great package for casual, or hardcore fans. It's almost as good as the 5 star "Pauls Boutique".Free Music Review: Huge fun!!
Hit: 5 Stars
The Beastie Boys showcase their truly eclectic nature with this 42-track greatest hits collection that showcasing almost every genre of music done in the past century, all in the work of three funky Jewish white rapper boys from New York. Any band that can mix together turntablism, rap, hip-hop, rock, bossa nova, hillbilly country, hardcore punk, funk, R&B, and God knows what else into a stew that doesn't seem contrived and jumbled is a band that truly deserves our respect indeed. Wonderful sounds for all!Free Music Review: Hopefully not the last bit of science...
Hit: 3 Stars
The cover photo of the Beastie Boys as old men is appropriate for this greatest hits of sorts since it's a kind of revisionist history on the band. With dozens and dozens of tracks, this set is still missing a good part of who the Beastie Boys are and were. Granted, it's great to have a release where we get plenty of new and/or rare material since so many greatest hits are just repackaged same old same old with one or two new tracks. On that note, it's recommended for the die-hard fan to get everything.
However, for those who prefer to go the `Greatest Hits' routes with certain bands, I still wouldn't recommend this set. Go and pick up the (low retail) Beastie albums. There aren't so many of them and the rewards are far greater than this 2CD set can provide.
Look carefully. There is a suspicious dearth of material from both License to Ill (the biggest selling rap album ever) and the ignored-at-first-before-serious-critical-reconsideration follow-up Paul's Boutique. By 1999, when Sounds appeared, the Beasties had developed into a socially conscious group of men who wanted to put their loud, obnoxious, beer drinking, breath stinking, sniffing glue selves behind and focus on whatever kept them hip and interested. However, it's from that incarnation as bratty misfits that some of their best material comes and it's only because of that start that they were able to reinvent themselves so successfully with the mighty comeback of Check Your Head in 1992.
I've always been a huge fan of the Beastie boys as rappers, since it is what they clearly do best. Their forays into hardcore (including the early incarnation of the group and the revisited punk on Ill Communication), the obsessively in-joke heavy oddities, and the frankly, sub-par instrumentals (I would rather listen to the fine musicians they are trying to imitate than listen to third-rate players) indicate that the group doesn't want to be pigeonholed. However, years later some of it really sounds like backfire, especially as the silence from the group, the folding of their record label Grand Royal, and the changes to the rap and rock scene have many people thinking that the Beastie Boys just can't be important anymore.
Well, you can't please everyone. The tracks on here are great, but I would have opted for a more wide-ranging selection of Beastie material. Are they trying to play down the brilliance of songs like Posse in Effect or Rhyming and Stealing? Who can turn down a line like, "you know I got rhymes like Abe Vigoda"? Instead, we get Alive, the new Beastie single from this set, which is also one of their worst singles. Sounding like a blatant cutting-room floor track from Hello Nasty it features the not-so-subtle calls for `socialize' and even knocks the `income tax'. Forgive me if I find rich, left wing rappers approaching 40 and talking about the unfairness of capitalism to be a bit too much, but methinks the Boys need to think about where the Beastie empire is headed. The 1990s were very kind to them; it was definitely their decade. It remains to be seen what they can get away with.
Whew. Sorry about that. Being a big fan, I would recommend this to completists and die-hards, otherwise pick up the separate albums and explore this important group.
Free Music Review: the sounds of science? not scientific at all.....
Hit: 1 Stars
how could a certain music group put out a collection of their greatest hits and name this collection of hits the THE SOUNDS OF SCIENCE without including a very great song on theirs sharing the same name? that hardly makes sense to me???