Beastie Boys, Check Your Head: Review and Verdict

Start with the production, because that is where the album earns its reputation. Mario Caldato Jr. co-produced with the group, and the shift to playing their own instruments gives the music a physical presence. The drums sound like a kit in a room, the bass is thick and slightly distorted, and Money Mark adds keyboards that give the funk cuts a warm, lived-in wobble. The sound is less sample-driven than the group's last record, and where samples do appear, as on "Jimmy James" with its Hendrix material or "Pass The Mic," they are used as seasoning rather than as the foundation. The result is a record with air in it, which was rare in rap at the time.

The band approach also changes how the vocals behave. Many of the lead voices run through a harsh, distorted treatment that makes them sound like a bullhorn in a garage, and that suits the group's wiseacre persona. It also buries some of the words. The Entertainment Weekly line about underwater recording is overstated, but there is a real point under it: the mix sometimes favors texture over clarity, and the jokes land less cleanly than they did on the previous two albums.

That leads to the weakness. The writing is the loosest the trio had delivered. The NME complaint that the lyrics regressed into improvised shouting is partly fair. Much of the record trades the dense, referential wordplay of the group's earlier work for banter and attitude, and on weaker songs the verses feel like warm-ups rather than finished rhymes. The rapping is still charming, and the group's timing is better than ever, but the pen is not as sharp as the groove it rides on.

The larger point, and the one the consensus gets wrong, is about genre. One retrospective claims rap was no longer the foundation of the music. That undersells it. Take away the rapping from the best songs and there is little left, because the grooves are built to support three voices passing a microphone. This is a rap record that learned to play, not a rock record with a rap habit, and what it adds to the lineage is a way to keep hip-hop's rhythmic call-and-response while swapping the sampler for a band. The hardcore blasts and Sly Stone cover are a reminder of where the three came from, and the funk and jazz-leaning numbers point to where they were going.

As a sequence, Check Your Head behaves like a mixtape made by three friends with different tastes, and it is better at the start than at the end. The opening stretch is the strongest: it leads with a hard, hooky single, moves quickly into the album's best rap performances, and gives the funk cuts room to breathe before the first wave of punk arrives. The pacing is surprisingly deliberate. Each style gets enough space to register before the next one cuts in.

The punk songs are the point of greatest friction. A cover like "Time For Livin'" is a loud, short reminder that the group came up in hardcore, and it works as a palate cleanser. When the hardcore bursts arrive back to back, though, they stop reading as surprise and start reading as obligation, and the momentum stalls. The instrumentals have a similar effect. A stretch of wordless funk and jazz jams late in the running order is pleasant, and it shows how well the band plays, but it also means the second half contains much less of what people came for.

The record recovers near the end, and the closing track, "Namasté," lets the group wind down in a looser, more reflective mood. Twenty tracks is too long for this material. A tighter fourteen, with the strongest rap songs, the funkiest numbers and one or two punk blasts, would have been a better album and a clearer statement. As it is, the length gives the record a sprawling, hang-out feel that is part of its charm and also the reason it does not rank higher in the group's catalog.

In the Beastie Boys catalog, Check Your Head sits just behind Ill Communication, which takes the same band-plus-rap idea and delivers it with sharper songs and more rapping. Paul's Boutique remains the group's best record, a dense, endlessly rewarding sample collage, and Licensed to Ill is the tighter and funnier of the early pair. Check Your Head ranks fourth by a narrow margin because it is the loosest of the four, and also the one with the most influence. Its importance in the lineage is bigger than its score: this is where a rap group made the case that hip-hop could be played live without losing its swing.

It is for listeners who like their rap with a rhythm section, for fans of the funk-and-punk crossover of the early 1990s, and for anyone who wants to understand how the alt-rock era absorbed hip-hop. It is also for people who found the group's earlier work too jokey and want a record with more groove. Skip it if you need dense, quotable lyricism, or if you want a front-to-back rap album with no instrumentals and no hardcore detours. The album has aged well on its strengths, with the funk cuts and singles sounding warmer today than most 1992 rap records, while the filler sounds as filler always does.

Start with "Pass The Mic" for the group at full rap strength, then "So What'cha Want" for the hook that sold the record, and then "Something's Got To Give" for the funk-jazz side. If you want the sample-collage extreme that this album reacted against, go to Paul's Boutique next. If you want the same live approach with sharper songs, Ill Communication is the logical sequel.

Check Your Head is the sound of three men deciding that having a good time with their own instruments mattered more than being right, and the strange part is that they were.