Ad-Rock Project Due in Feb

Beastie Boy Ad-Rock and pal AWOL have completed their second full-length album as BS2000 and their first since 1997's limited-edition collection of garage blips and blasts, Nobody Beats BS2000. The twenty-song Simply Mortified (the U.K. version will feature an extra cut) will make its way to shelves on February 6th, though fans who saunter to the Grand Royal Web site can download one cut ("The Scrappy") and see the laundry-themed video for another ("Buddy") right now. The album was for the most part recorded in Minneapolis and New York and self-produced by the pair.

This go-round the twosome, sometimes known as Adam Horowitz and touring Beastie drummer Amery Smith, have taken a more traditional pop approach, abandoning the instrumental Casio-jams of their debut in favor of a lo-fi, drum-and-Farfisa joint laced with Ad and AWOL's potent microphone science. The partners, likely augmented by some other players, will be rolling BS2000 over to Japan for a week of dates with ex-Bikini Kill frontgrrrl Kathleen Hanna's electro-punk outfit Le Tigre (beginning February 12th at Club Quattro in Tokyo). Though nothing's official yet, it looks like the duo will also be making the rounds stateside and in the U.K. in the late winter/early spring.

In a post at the Grand Royal site, Ad-Rock shows his excitement for the coming release and road stint in typically dry fashion. "I'd like to encourage people to come down, come see us, come share with us their movements, their own dances," he writes. "They don't have to do the same dances everyone else is doing, they can come down and do a multitude of dances. We do not want the people to stand still. I feel that people might be bored with just rocking their head back and forth. We want to implement the entire body into dance."

GREG HELLER
(January 13, 2001)