"Now comes a ludicrously fabulous, oftmanic, sometimes mellow 22-song long player of such astounding variety that it seems a lot longer than 67 minutes: Hello Nasty. Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA opened their career with a pair of hip-hop albums (Licensed to III and Paul’s Boutique), then shifted gears for a pair of records that were more punk influenced (Check Your Head and III Communication). With their fifth proper album, a playfully mature Beastie record (if that’s possible), they turn the focus back toward hip-hop — there’s not one hárdcore punk song here — but with an understanding of how to conflate their two largest influences into one smooth-flowing package. Imagine the collaboration that Black Flag and De La Soul might have made, mixing jaunty samples and esoteric beats with punk-guitar crunch while shifting between that old we’re-havin’-fun-on-the-mike ethos and a primal, post-vocal wail. Imagine a sonic mix that’s about sixty-five to seventy percent the frenetic, sample-crazy hip-hop eclecticism of Paul’s Boutique and about 25 to 30 percent the funk-punk fun of III Communication — with a cool, Latin-influenced near-instrumental (“Song for Junior”) and a sublime Brazilian-flavored acoustic number called “I Don’t Know,” which is sweetly delivered by MCA(??): “I’m walking through time/Deluded as the next guy/Pretending and hoping to find/That distant peace of mind,” and at that point you, too, will do a double take What? Did my Smashing Pumpkins CD sneak into the player? No, that’s just one of the many nice surprises on Hello Nasty — they wail, they whisper, they sample Spanish, they sample a little kid, they let Biz Markie and reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry do whatever they want. Still, it all flows so neatly, it’s like a single, multigroove, multisample, multihook sound collage that kinda morphs into something else every few minutes, with movements titled in a classically smart-aleck Beastie fashion — “Super Disco Breakin,'” “Song for the Man,” “Sneakin’ out the Hospital,” “Dr. Lee, Ph.D.” Good luck digesting all this sonic info before Labor Day. Hip-hop hasn’t unleashed anything this fantastically dense since the heyday of De La and Public Enemy."

- Rolling Stone