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*** BS 2000

SIMPLY MORTIFIED

(Grand Royal)

Adam Horovitz, better known as Beastie Boy Ad-Rock, understands that political statements and party music sometimes go hand in hand. He’s spent 20 years proving it with the Beasties, deploying goofy rhymes and a signature brand of punk rock cum hip-hop to check the heads of the nascent rap-metal clods chomping at the bit to fight for their right to party. But with BS 2000, a new project he shares with Beastie associate Amery Smith, he’s dedicating his time and effort to giving those clods something to get jiggy with.

Not that that’s a bad thing: the duo’s debut full-length is a freewheeling Saturday-night extravaganza of lo-fi organ-based funkadelica, as swinging and loose-limbed as the best of the blunted instrumental workouts that have peppered Beasties’ albums, and as blissfully content-free as the name BS 2000 suggests. This is pop of the 21st-century variety, assembled from sonic scraps found on pop’s cutting-room floor — not unlike the music Horovitz’s current flame Kathleen Hanna has been making with Le Tigre, only without that band’s inextinguishable spark of righteous indignation. Then again, if actions speak louder than words, then BS 2000’s attempts to erase the penciled-in lines separating rock from rap from funk from soul may just qualify as a political statement of sorts.

— Mikael Wood