The Mix-Up is billed as the Beastie Boys’ “first ever album of all-new instrumental material,” although the NYC trio have been playing around with wordless funk and jazz pieces throughout their career. Indeed, in 1996 the group issued the instrumental compilation album The In Sound From Way Out!
As ever when the Boys switch from hip-hop tag team to three-piece musical unit, The Mix-Up features Mike D on drums, Ad-rock on guitars and MCA on bass, with accompaniment from Mark Nishita (clavinet, Rhodes, Farfisa) and Alfredo Ortiz (percussion). The record is clearly intended as a loose, playful exercise following the Bush-baiting To The 5 Boroughs, an album recorded in the aftermath of 9/11 which pointedly featured an illustration of the Twin Towers on the cover.
The sleeve art this time around is a Beck-style, boho art collage (the connections with that performer go deeper, with the two acts sharing producers in the Dust Brothers and Mario Caldato Jr, and Beck even sampling the Beasties’ ‘So What’cha Want on ‘E-Pro’). Musically, too, The Mix-Up is quite a departure from the Boys’ previous album, swapping electro hip-hop for excursions into funk, dub and soul.
The album kicks off with ‘B For My Name’, a classic funk mix of bass, drums, wah-wah guitar and organ, while the following ‘14th Street Break’ is a slightly more psychedelic take on the same template, with hypnotic rhythms and spacey effects to the fore. The track also features a wonderful percussive sequence complete with cowbell and whistles, proving that the Beasties know how to sustain a groove with considerable flair.
‘Suco De Tangerina’ and ‘The Gala Event’ find the group venturing into dub territory, with the former an upbeat, danceable number and the latter a rather eerier affair, more ‘Ghost Town’ than ‘Funkytown’. Perhaps the standout track on the album is ‘Electric Worm’, an inspired funk workout that would do George Clinton proud.
Unfortunately, after the warm soul groove of ‘Freaky Hijiki’, The Mix Up gets a little samey in the second half. The Beasties were never ones for epic running times, and this record is certainly no exception (the average track length is around three-and-a-half minutes), but there is no doubt that the laid-back, loungey vibe does start to pall after a while.
That said, there are some diamonds in the rough. ‘The Rat Cage’ is a punky mix of thudding bass, piercing guitar and screeching noise, while ‘Dramastically Different’ deploys a sitar to wonderfully atmospheric effect. In addition, the closing ‘Kangaroo Rat’ is one of the best tracks, a supremely funky tune built around a cracking bassline.
Overall, The Mix-Up lacks a powerhouse single in the vein of ‘Sabotage’ or ‘Intergalactic’, and as such is unlikely to repeat the chart-topping, multi-platinum success of albums like Licensed To Ill, Ill Communication and Hello Nasty. Nonetheless, the group do regularly manage to alchemise the base musical elements into mellow gold.
Illustration: Jon Berkeley