Mix Master Mike, eminent DJ and Beastie Boys co-conspirator, doesn't fancy himself a backup musician. Anti-Theft Device, his epic thirty-one-track cut-and-scratch manifesto, puts forward turntabling as an end in and of itself. There is little glue to hold the album's snippets of music, movies and other random soundage together, beyond a few long loops, verbal cues and drum tracks. Quick cuts pile one on top of another, forming their own new thing – an alternate universe in which Roxanne Shanté guest-stars with the Brady Bunch and Mix Master Mike is a comicbook superhero who saves the world with his wicked beats. It's great when it works: "Jack Knyfe" is a paranoid thriller that functions equally well as background and foreground music. But when the samples and scratches amass without becoming greater than the sum of their parts, the superhero needs to be saved from himself. (RS 795)

NATASHA STOVALL