If Big Star (the previous album) are sadly overlooked by history, I think sometimes The Rolling Stones are over-hyped. This is another double album, which seem to be the rage at the moment. My sense is that the majority of double albums are usually 75% good material at best, and they either have the one duff side, or a mix of filler and good. And personally I think this one falls into the latter camp.
That’s not to say, actually, that it’s *bad*, but it doesn’t feel like the Stones at their best, more an attempt to recreate the sounds of Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed. There’s a sloppiness to the whole production, and a very loose sense to the timing, which works as a creative choice – there’s a certain art to playing or singing slightly out of time, consistently, so that you’re still in time. The backing vocals, for example, trail the main vocals by a fraction of a beat, but it works to give a kind of garage band feel to the album.
The big hit from this album is Tumbling Dice, which through Mandela Effect I could have sworn was on Sticky Fingers. I think the lack of the Rock Apostrophe counts against it – it really ought to be “Tumblin’ Dice”, and the fact that it’s the only real big track off a double album says a lot. Yes, the rock and roll throwback Rip This Joint crops up on compilations, as does Happy. Despite a glorious title, Turd On The Run is not the most exciting of tracks, I was hoping for a version of Manfred Mann’s Fox On The Run with the word “fox” replaced by the word “turd”, because I’m childish like that.
The opening track is “Rocks Off”, which I realised I was expecting to be the Primal Scream song Rocks, which I believe was written by Bobby Gillespie to sound like a Rolling Stones song. The Primal Scream one is better.
Overall, this wasn’t in my opinion, the Stones’ best endeavour. I return to my musings on double albums, that most of them would be better with some ruthless culling and perhaps more time to develop the existing songs to a single album. A lot of this is probably an artifact of the physical restrictions of pressed vinyl – if you’ve got about 65 minutes of good material do you discard twenty minutes of tracks to fit it on a single album, or add in some substandard stuff to pad it out?
By the way, technically we’re one quarter of the way through, but since I’m using the collated list from all editions of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, which consists of about 1089 albums, I won’t actually be at 25% until just over 270 albums. So save the champagne for now.
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