Beastie Boys – Hello Nasty [1998; Brooklyn Dust Music, Capitol Records, EMI, EMI Music Canada, Gala Records, Grand Royal, KA Music]

Following the stylistic sprawl of 1994′s Ill Communication, the Beastie Boys returned with a new DJ (Mixmaster Mike, replacing DJ Hurricane, and making it clear with “Three MCs and One DJ”) and an increasingly light-hearted mood. Packing 22 tracks, the album moves at a fairly quick clip, with just one of the songs breaking the four-minute mark, though none drop below two minutes. With producer Mario Caldato, Jr., held over from their last two albums, plucks of piano, beat loops, and miscellaneous sampled garnishes (with an apparent delight in corny speech samples and dance instructions) are melded together with smooth but punchy flow, bolstered by a willingness to kick the bass in hard.

Notably reduced is the presence of Money Mark, whose keyboard work was all over Ill Communication and appears on only four of Hello Nasty’s tracks, but the range of enlisted styles roams wide enough to make up for his omission. As shown in the album’s break-out hit, “Intergalactic”, the goofy and chill are blended to fine effect, but there’s also efforts at jumping from hip-hop into downtempo jazz, funk, trip-hop, world music, and even folk pop, making for an experience which really luxuriates in its late-’90s origins. Quirkier
and with a lighter tone

than previous albums, Hello Nasty makes for something of an odd cap on the ‘90s version of the Beastie Boys, even while establishing Mixmaster Mike as their most iconic DJ, but the abundance of ideas it collects is appreciable even when the sunniness gets a little tiresome.

Skinny Puppy – Last Rights [1992; Capitol Records, Nettwerk, Nettwerk Europe, Play It Again Sam]

Murky, discordant, and often agonized, Last Rights would be the last album from Skinny Puppy before the band’s complete disintegration (including the death of member Dwayne Goettel) on 1995′s The Process. With a focus on intensive layering, the songs tend to be virtual morasses of electronic and instrumental samples, with vocalist Nivek Ogre’s rasping, growling, and groaning (apocryphally under the influence of enough drugs to give him in-studio seizures) worming through the audio. Between bouts of harsh noise dissolution, the music drifts into more regulated rhythms, semi-discernible lyrics, and clearer sample sources, until the energy clots back up into further bursts.

But for all of the chaos and intentional disjointedness, the songs of the album flow together remarkably well, with the quick turns and disintegrating structures collapsing smoothly (relatively speaking) into each other. The frequent dives into portions without vocals tend to make it feel more fully-realized, oddly enough, with the final track, “Download” (substituted for the original last track due to sample copyright claims) following that path all the way into a side-band of the same name. While not as memorable in individual tracks as other albums in the group’s catalog, it does come off as an intensely earnest and effort-packed release, one which gels together with more effectiveness than any of their subsequent LPs.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

Another alternate.

And the reissue cover art.

Beastie Boys – Ill Communication [1994; Brooklyn Dust Music, Capitol Records, Capitol Records Ltd., EMI, EMI Music Canada, EMI Odeon Chilena S.A., Grand Royal]

After the success of their first three albums, the Beastie Boys continued expanding their sound palette with Ill Communication, with jazz samples, punk interludes,
electronic filters, and lots of humor. Trimming out the short joke tracks of Check Your Head, the group shows more focus on playing around with the rap components, with the members playing the instruments for a chunk of their backbeats, letting a couple of tracks run on into abrupt cut-offs, building the cop-drama-homage music video for “Sabotage”, and bringing in a handful of guests (including Suicidal Tendencies’ Amery Smith, A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, and Biz Markie).

Despite the sharp twists in style from song to song, the album keeps a chill flow intact, largely due to the persistent personalities of the three MCs, even across the instrumental tracks. The heavy use of filters on their voices does get tiresome at times, but the amount of other effects going on at the same time helps distract from it, to a degree. Though it would be four years before the next album emerged (bringing Mixmaster Mike in to replace DJ Hurricane), the diversification over the eight years between their frat rap debut and this LP shows how much their hunger for fun helped them develop.

Here’s the alternate cover art.