Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique (2 LP 180 Gram)

5 stars out of 5 -- "[A] high-water mark of hip-hop's golden age of sampling....PAUL'S BOUTIQUE became a dense, dizzying collision of lyrical references..."
Ranked #5 in Rolling Stone's "50 Coolest Records" - "...Their accidental turn into great artists..."
Ranked #156 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" - "[I]t ambitiously stitches together song fragments in a way rarely seen before or since."
5 stars out of 5 - "...A celebration of American junk culture that is still blowing minds today - even fourteen years of obsessive listening can't exhaust all the musical and lyrical jokes crammed into PAUL'S BOUTIQUE..."
"Dense, arty, and with enough production hijinks to fill a junkshop, it honored hip-hop history while predicting the future."
3 Stars - Good - "...betters its Bud-spraying predecessor on all counts: slower, funkier, funnier more diverse in reference....there is upbeat fun...silliness...and brooding invention..."
5 stars out of 5 -- "Put together on samplers with tiny memories, small fragments of staggeringly disparate musics drop in, then are snatched away abruptly; rhythms and melodies remain in focus as textures and sounds constantly shift."
"...An album which shredded the rulebook. From 'Psycho' to 'Superfly', from Sly Stone to Ringo's dope beats on SGT. PEPPER, there's so much going on here that it sounds like a compilation....one of the most inventive rap albums ever made."
9 - Excellent Plus - "...Five years on from its release way back in August '89, [PAUL'S BOUTIQUE] is still an electrifying blast of cool....If you thought ILL COMMUNICATION was cool, check its younger incarnation..."
Pitchfork (Website) - "PAUL'S BOUTIQUE is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades' postmodern identity..."
4 stars out of 5 -- "[M]usic that seemed to digest all that had gone before it....An astonishing coming of age document..."