"We're gonna party for the right to fight."

So says Mike D. on the sixth album from New York's Beastie Boys -- and we couldn't sum up either their musical evolution or current state of mind any tidier and more eloquently than that.

For those who haven't been paying attention, though, allow us to quickly recap: Twenty years ago, Mike Diamond, Adam (AdRock) Horowitz and Adam (MCA) Yauch lurched on to the rap scene with a Bud in one hand and a stripper in the other, ready to fight for their right to party.

Since then, however, these clown princes of hip-hop have grown from B-Boys to men who rock the mic for social change, using their lyrics to decry a host of societal and political ills.

For three guys with so much to say, six years is a long time to keep quiet. So it's perhaps no surprise that To the 5 Boroughs -- their long-anticipated followup to 1998's Hello Nasty -- is the trio's most topical and pointedly political disc to date.

"Environmental destruction and the national debt / But plenty of dollars left in the fat war chest," they note on It Takes Time to Build. "Maybe it's time that we impeach Tex." And that's just one example -- several of these 15 tracks follow suit, slamming Bush, the wars against terror, Afghanistan and Iraq, WMDs and nuclear proliferation.

But if the Beasties have upped the rhetoric, they haven't done it at the expense of their music. Although this self-produced disc clocks in at a relatively lean 42 minutes -- and admittedly never pushes the sonic envelope as far as Paul's Boutique or Hello Nasty did -- there's still plenty of funtime.

From opener Ch-Check it Out to closer We Got The, these cuts feature all the elements we've come to know, love and expect from these mooks: The funky beats, the electro-grooves, the quirky crate-digger samples (everyone from The Partridge Family to The Dead Boys), the obscure pop-culture references ("I've got more rhymes than Carl Sagan's got turtlenecks"), the turntable trickery and sophomoric bluster ("If you don't like it then hey f--k you!").

When you consider all that, who cares if To the 5 Boroughs is kind of a political album? At least it's a political party album. And we'll fight for our right to that any day.

Track Listing
1. Ch-Check It Out
2. Right Right Now Now
3. 3 The Hard Way
4. Time To Build
5. Rhyme The Rhyme Well
6. Triple Trouble
7. Hey F*?# You
8. Oh Word?
9. That's It That's All
10. All Life Styles
11. Shazam!
12. An Open Letter To NYC
13. Crawlspace
14. The Brouhaha
15. We Got The