Beastie Boys
The Mix-Up

EMI 2007

By ignore staff

So many pencil erasers will end up with bite marks with The Mix-Up in the background it’s golden. We wish we had some loose leaf and leftover calculus to crack, or slaved at a Dairy Queen to count the cash tills and make the nightly drop. The Mix-Up is choice concentration muzak and displays a reserved allocation of funkiness that the Beasties’ instrumental comp The In Sound from the Way Out did not.

Why are the glossies so womping on this? It’s a focused little jam session-stab-intermission between albums wrapped up like a present, and has the benefits of aural green tea. The album was streamed free-as-a-slap on Brooklyn Vegan, no less.

If your 28-year-old musician friend played you this, the sole product of his years of creative tribulation, you’d dig it, but also want to comfort the guy. It’s not going to crossover or loan him a ’08 Mercedes. But knowing old silver-fox Yauch is behind the just-serviceable-punk basslines on the foreboding mission cruise “The Rat Cage” should earn a smile of appreciation.

Like those crackling characters wandering in a blaxplotation universe once overseen by Curtis Mayfield, the urban mythology that has roamed the infective consciousness of MCA, Ad-rock and Mike D for 20 plus years, these tracks push forward with a methodical done-proved-it finesse. Don’t get ink on your tongue.

This discourse of Beastie Boys' The Mix-Up is written by the staff of ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.