Check Your Head
	1992

Check Your Head review by Rolling Stone

The Beastie Boys - Mike D., MCA and Ad-Rock - are back after a three-year hiatus with their most unconventional outing to date. While their first two albums, Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique, presented in-your-face rhymes, offbeat humor and a white-boy perspective on the hip-hop world, Check Your Head has a simple formula: no formula at all. Returning to their instrumental roots - they started out as a thrash band - the Beasties play a good chunk of the music on the album, blending Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired bass with hard-core hip-hop, frantic DJ scratches and quirky samples of Bob Dylan and Jimmie "J.J." Walker, headbanging punk, gospel sounds and any and every other element in their musical arsenal. The three instrumentals on the album ("Pow," "Groove Holmes" and "In 3's") are soaked in Seventies funk, while old-school-flavored tracks like "Pass the Mic," "Finger Lickin' Good" and "The Maestro" underscore the group's rhyming skills. "Funky Boss" is a slick reggae cut propelled by a slinky guitar, whereas the riffs on "Gratitude" and "Time for Livin'" feature high-density punk-rock guitar textures. "Namaste," an abstract poetic venture, drowns itself in fuzzy bass licks, and "Lighten Up," lifted by African beats, journeys into the psychedelic. Determined to be as eclectic as possible, the Beasties even whisper-croon on the album ("Mark on the Bus") and feature hip-hop funny man Biz Markie in a cameo ("The Biz vs. the Nuge"). The cross-pollination of styles on Check Your Head is confusing at times, yet the album achieves distinction because of its ingenuity. Beneath the seeming chaos, the Beastie Boys have created a harmonious playground out of their musical fantasies. (RS 633) KEVIN POWELL

Check Your Head review by CMJ

"I can play the drums/I can play guitar/We're not just B-Boys/We're real rock stars," they yelled in 1985 on the infamous "Rock Hard" single, and now-seven years on and relocated to Cali-the Beastie Boys stand ready to deliver the goods on that promise. It's only natural that the Beasties would reinvent themselves completely for their third LP (as they've already done umpteen times before), and it's really no surprise that they turn out to be absolutely ace funk musicians-like rubbery cartoon characters, they just don't seem to have any limits on what they can or can't do when they really want to. The post-Paul's Boutique hiatus found them building their own G-Son studio, buying loads of good gear dirt cheap from the pages of the L.A. want ads, studying the groove from the inside out, and enlisting master carpenter Marc Ramos Nishita to nail down some funky, soulful Hammond organ and jazzy keyboards. And so, not only is Check Your Head one of the best LPs of 1992, it could also be one of the best albums of 1972. It's like disco never happened, an aural tour of soul and funk bins of the mind, full of long-lost masterpieces both artfully sampled and lovingly recreated: Superfly congas, Sly Stone anthems, Shaft-styled wah-wah, and so on. Two sealed copies: "Pass The Mic," "Professor Booty" and "Finger Lickin'," or the metaphysical waxings "Stand Together," "Lighten Up" and "Namaste'." - Joseph Patel

Check Your Head review by Amazon

With their third album, the Beasties transformed themselves from smart-ass punks with a hip-hop jones into a playful live funk band with some solid rhymes, assisted by the extraordinary keyboardist Mark Ramos Nishita. A couple of tracks look back to their old school rap roots, and they still deploy goofy samples like nobody's business, but they're mostly making their own grooves (including some instrumentals worthy of being sampled in their own right). Their universalist world-view results in some excellent, off-the-wall fusions--the metalloid bump that forms the funk pulse of "So What'cha Want," Sly Stone's "Time for Livin'" transformed into a hard-rock bomber--but they don't have to prove how clever they are any more, and they're stronger and more humane for it. --Douglas Wolk