Beastie Boys - Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds Of Science - 1999 - Grand Royal
This collection is really frustrating to me. As a huge fan of the Beasties, I feel like this should be the greatest compilation ever. But it really just doesn't sit well to me as a cohesive whole. I think perhaps if it were a single disc, it could have been a lot tighter. But I'm always personally thrown off by compilations that don't either have some sort of theme, or at least present themselves chronologically. Maybe if disc one had been all the singles and disc two all the deeper cuts it would have worked better for me. Instead we have a pretty crazy package that includes well known singles, remixes, b-sides, and unreleased tracks (including a couple from the unreleased Country Mike album). To be sure, there's a lot of good stuff here. It's just the format that makes it one I don't reach for often. Perhaps part of the problem for me is that the albums proper are just so good, that's easier to feel like listening to a specific one instead. Though it might sound funny to say, even as I say all this I'd still consider The Sounds Of Science to be totally necessary for any fan of the group. The fact is that there are enough rarities here to make it worth owning even if you already have all the individual albums. Obviously the single "Alive" is included here, but tracks like the previously unreleased "Live Wire," Fatboy Slim's remix of "Body Movin'," or the video version of "Three MC's And One DJ" all make this worth picking up. In fact, it makes me hope that we'll eventually see a full release (or two, or three...) of nothing but rare and unreleased Beasties material. Although ironically I think I'd suggest this to fans even more so for the liner notes that have nice long pieces written about each track. In a sense, these stories are the part that will really anthologize these songs more successfully than the compilation did by itself.