BS 2000
Simply Mortified
(Grand Royal)
BS2000 started a couple years ago as sort of a music swapping thing between Beastie Boy member Adam Horowitz and Amery "Awol" Smith. Although the two lived on seperate coasts, they sent music back and forth and eventually spawned a limited edition, vinyl only release. Now, the duo is back with a true follow-up (including a pressing in the digital domain of compact discs) and instead of composing everything on a sampling drum machine (as they did with their previous release), they learned a few more instruments (and I stress the word few) and tried to fill out their sound a little bit.
Simply Mortified is 20 tracks and just over 45 minutes of lo-fi keyboard boogie grooves, weird samples, and some genuinely catchy tracks. As you could expect from the running time and number of tracks, nothing really lasts too long and while the style of music on the release never really changes up too much, the group at least knows the value of brevity.
Things start out in a very promising way on the disc with the silly but catchy "N.Y. Is Good" before jumping into the keyboard punk of "Sick For A Reason." They even manage to make a track that revolves around the sample of a little girl talking about their gropu and how much she likes to dance to them with "Yeah I Like BS" while "No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach Is In)" shuffles along with a truly excellent little melody and enough cheese to sound like a slightly hopped-up version of a 70s television show theme song.
Of course, for every song like the awesome keyboard grime of "The Scrappy" (which like many tracks on the disc, sounds like a Beastie Boys outtake), there is another track that feels like sort of a like a fragment of a song that really doesn't go anywhere. Sure, it's great for those with a short attention span and a true love of wacky little keyboard tracks, but in the end Simply Mortified would have probably worked even better had it been chopped down to about a half hour and 15 tracks or less. Hardcore fans of the Beasties will no doubt want to pick this up, it's not nearly as well constructed of a release as something like Money Marks Push The Button. Still, it's light, there's some fun to be had, and summer is just around the corner.
Rating: 6
