The Beastie Boys – Ill Communication (30th Anniversary 3 LPs)

What does it sound like?:

If ever people started taking The Beastie Boys seriously, it must have been 1994. The goofy adolescents of Licensed To Ill, the spoilt frat boys in the sweetie shop of Paul’s Boutique and the lo-fi skater punks of Check Your Head, were beginning to grow up. They sharpened up their rhymes and broadened their scope with jazz, funk, flutes, a violin, golf, social conscience, climate change and Buddhism, alongside their usual obsessions with big beats, garage rock, basketball and partying. They still retained their wit, charm and an inclination to frivolity, but in a way that’s more self aware. They threw in a few dick jokes to keep themselves grounded, but there is no doubt they’d become a bit more sophisticated. They were actually a tight little unit that could actually play: Ad-Rock guitar, MCA bass, Mike D drums, Money Mark keys and Eric Bobo percussion with Mario Caldato producing. Two punk thrash tracks have Amery Smith on drums. Biz Markie pays another visit and Q-Tip’s guest spot confirms how far they’d moved towards the jazz vibe of A Tribe Called Quest. The instrumentals prove they’d bothered to put in hours of practice. Unlike those on Check Your Head, these withstand more than one listen. By keeping up the sampling, scratching and rapping, they managed to have one foot in Indie Rock and the other in Hip Hop, straddling the two best selling genres of the time.

Ill Communication is front-loaded with its big hitters, cooling off a little in the second half. Sure Shot is as confident a groove as an opener can be. Tracks five, six and seven hit a peak, not just for this album but for the whole of 1994 and, maybe, for The Beastie Boys’ entire canon: Root Down’s greasy funk would have pleased James Brown, Sabotage is as filthy and shouty as Rock gets and Get It Together glides along beautifully on a sly bass line. These four tracks were released as singles with good reason. The rest doesn’t hit that standard but nothing is a real duffer and there is a lot of fun to be had. It put them back at the top of the Billboard chart, selling millions.

Ill Communication was conceived as a twenty-track, hour long CD. In 2009, it was remastered and expanded with alternate mixes and outtakes to a 2 CD set. This is that exact product on three pieces of vinyl, no extras, no trimmings, and there is a cassette version available, too. The artwork, featuring a Bruce Davidson photograph taken in 1964, deserves twelve square inches, as does the booklet with “Gaia” by Alex Grey in the middle. The bonus tracks are pretty good, on the whole, particularly the Free Zone mix of Root Down, Buck-Wild remix of Get It Together and European B-Boy version of Sure Shot. There are a couple of live tracks to give us mere mortals insight into the atmosphere of a pepped up Beastie Boys’ gig but there is also the inclusion of a recording of the Boys playing basketball while stoned. Most punters will be playing LP1 and rarely getting to LP3.

After thirty years, Ill Communication is just as invigorating as it ever was. It may be their best album. It certainly is their best half hour.

What does it all *mean*?

At last, hipsters can have a vinyl copy of a cool hipster album.

Goes well with…

Streaming. Apply some ruthless editing and create an outstanding 40 minute playlist. (I may have said this before.)

Release Date:

26/07/2024

Might suit people who like…

Skateboarding while listening to jazz.

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