Hello Nasty

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

When they first achieved prominence back in the '80s, the Beasties styled themselves as hipper than hip-hop, cooler than punk and masters of both. The trio's over-the-top boasts seemed to send up each genre's excesses. But the Beasties' new CD comes across not as a send-up but as a limp imitation of more interesting performers. The album's buzzing, beeping, video-game-like sound is an exhausted ripoff of hip-hop folk star Beck. A few songs work, like the sci-fi rap number Intergalactic. But for the most part, listening to this album is a tedious, dispiriting task not unlike sorting a backlog of junk e-mail.

--By Christopher John Farley