| September 4th, 2005 11:31 AM |
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| lonecrapshooter |
The Rolling Stones at Fenway Park in Boston last month. Robert Caplin/The New York Times
September 4, 2005
The Rolling Stones Get What They Need
By JON PARELES
SOMETIMES clichés are underrated. The Rolling Stones embrace them wholeheartedly on "A Bigger Bang" (Virgin), their first album of new songs since 1997, and they're better off for it.
The sound is unadorned Rolling Stones: two guitars, bass, drums, a splash of piano and Mick Jagger's trans-Atlantic blues bray. Horns are absent, backup singers and synthesizers are scarce. Nearly all of the 16 songs are about woman trouble, with titles as generic as "Let Me Down Slow," "Rain Fall Down" and "Dangerous Beauty." Take them at face value: the Stones have decided they don't need anything but the basics. A riff, a catchphrase, a smidgen of melody, an attitude, and there's a Stones song.
Consider "Oh No, Not You Again." It starts with Charlie Watts on drums socking the four 16th notes he has used to pump up scores of songs. Two chords bounce between rhythm guitars, and then stop-time chords blare while Mr. Jagger tries to snuff out an old flame: "Once bitten twice shy," he blurts in an unabashed cliché. When the guitars surge in for the three-chord chorus and Mr. Richards plays his 10,000th version of a Chuck Berry lick, it's inescapable: the old tricks still work.
At least they work for one band. Once the Stones were the model that half the rockers in the universe wanted to follow. Now, in the world of Jay-Z and Green Day, they're an anomaly, refusing to retire and still being handsomely rewarded for it. They play their old-fashioned handmade roots-rock as if they're revving up a perfectly maintained original Ford Mustang convertible. The kids probably don't care - they've got their skateboards, or their Hummers - but it's amazing that the thing still takes to the road at all.
"A Bigger Bang" accompanies a tour that started last month at Fenway Park in Boston and comes to Madison Square Garden on Sept. 13 and Giants Stadium two days later. The band knows that few if any of the people paying up to $450 for (unscalped) tickets are eager for new songs. When the Stones last toured, in 2002-3, they had only a greatest-hits collection to plug. Yet with the die-hard stubbornness of the whole routine - Mr. Jagger, 62, running across stadium stages and doing his hip-shimmying, shoulder-shaking, finger-pointing strut, and baby boomers in the audience longing to recapture youth as the ultimate luxury of age - it must be a point of pride for the band to come up with a new album too.
"A Bigger Bang" has little competition to reign as the best Stones album in two decades. While the band became a touring money machine, it got by with albums - all the way back to "Dirty Work" in 1986 - that included one song for the radio, a few for Keith Richards to croak through and a bunch of throwaways. The Stones tried to modernize and think grand thoughts with the overproduced, undercooked songs on "Bridges to Babylon" in 1997; they tried to strip down and slick up with "Voodoo Lounge" and "Steel Wheels," respectively, before that. But on "A Bigger Bang," the Stones actually sound like they're having fun together, live in a studio somewhere.
It's partly an illusion. "Oh No, Not You Again," which sounds like a simple recording of the thrust and counterthrust of the Stones' guitars onstage, doesn't have Ronnie Wood sharing lead and rhythm guitar; its guitars are credited to Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards (who also played bass), and sound mostly like Mr. Richards. The Stones' gift to rock, along with their song catalog, has been the way the band has defined looseness as perfection. While the rhythm section (which usually includes Darryl Jones on bass) is unswerving, everything on top of it seems up for grabs, not so much arranged as wrangled. To assemble that by overdubbing can't be as casual as it sounds.
The occasional ambitious thoughts on "A Bigger Bang" arrive in the most unadorned, old-fashioned music. In "Sweet Neo Con," Mr. Jagger alternates blues harmonica and disgust with Bush administration rhetoric - "It's liberty for all, democracy's our style/ Unless you are against us, then it's prison without trial." And "Back of My Hand" warns of "trouble a-comin' " in an echo of Delta blues, with Mr. Jagger on slide guitar.
But most of "A Bigger Bang" comes across as something assembled on a dare: How many songs could Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards knock together from a semi-familiar riff and a stock title? More than enough. "Rough Justice," echoing "Brown Sugar," sets the tone with its raunch and slide-guitar boogie. "Let Me Down Slow," akin to "Happy," has a cleverly effective chorus melody - a descending scale as Mr. Jagger sings "Let me down real slow" - and a pushy jumble of guitars. "She Saw Me Coming" unites its riff, title and vocal hook as one bluesy punch, and has some pithy humor: "What a cast of characters/ Her lovers and my friends." Two more of the album's many breakup songs, "Streets of Love" ("Angie" updated) and the countryish "Biggest Mistake," have lyrics that thoughtfully share the blame. And "Driving Too Fast" sets its warnings to another "Brown Sugar" variant that's completely at home on a car stereo.
The Stones know the destiny of "A Bigger Bang." As with the other latter-day Stones albums, most of it will be forgotten when the tour is over, and in the long run even its better songs won't stack up against "Gimme Shelter," "Tumbling Dice," "Honky Tonk Women," "No Expectations," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "The Last Time" and dozens of other past glories. "A Bigger Bang" is about simpler, more immediate pleasures: a twang, a beat, a moan, a laugh. They're enough to keep a great band going.
[Edited by lonecrapshooter]
[Edited by lonecrapshooter] |
| September 4th, 2005 11:33 AM |
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| mac_daddy |
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| September 4th, 2005 01:10 PM |
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| quackenbush |
That's an ok review,but what's with the Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards business?
[Edited by quackenbush] |
| September 4th, 2005 01:28 PM |
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| wgwalsh |
Everyone changes to some degree, even the Stones.
We should count ourselves blessed to still have them doing what they do after all that they have been through.
I rather enjoyed DON'T STOP and STEALING MY HEART from FORTY LICKS. Their sound has really developed into something better. It left me hungry for more.
Today's music business is tough and it would even give a band like the Stones problems if they were just shooting out of the gate.
Buy A BIGGER BANG when it is released this week and treat yourself to something very special when you play it. A nice bottle of wine and a good dinner with family and friends would be an event that you won't soon forget. |
| September 4th, 2005 02:44 PM |
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| the good |
quote:
quackenbush wrote:
That's an ok review,but what's with the Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards business?
[Edited by quackenbush]
Its just the New York Times being their pretentious selves as always. |
| September 4th, 2005 06:02 PM |
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| BlindLemon |
Have to agree 100%. This is certainly not a Websters def of "pretentious", but a pretentious piece of criticism to me is one where the critic is perfectly satisfied to mobilize certain stock elements of knowledge about his subject matter, prove that they neatly describe the album/band, and never venture to LISTEN to the music from the inside. I mean if u just read through it, its perspective on the album is completely from the outside, no trace of musical empathy (this - a requirement of good criticism IMHO - is replaced with fake empathy for the individuals playing the music). This guy, if this is his narrative about the album, has not REALLY listened to it once, has not let the music speak to him - be it shitty or good music, so all he can do is talk about the band, and how such a band at such a stage makes such an album. Oh-so-logical - it falls all into place, hardly a surprise, as this is really but a set of cliche conjunctions. A dozen better reviews have been pubished on this broad - with unique critical remarks alongside all the praise, that show that pple actually listened to the music, and, hell, I'd prefer someone to give a good trashing by actually criticizing the music by pointing out what does not work or what is missing, but that the NYTimes prints a review where the music is really not receiving any treatment, who care how many stars, just makes my cold Hungarian blood run hot. |
| September 4th, 2005 06:34 PM |
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| Mel Belli |
quote:
quackenbush wrote:
That's an ok review,but what's with the Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards business?
[Edited by quackenbush]
Nothing unusual about this. Some newspapers use courtesy titles; others don't. The New York Times always has. |
| September 4th, 2005 07:33 PM |
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| time is on my side |
quote:
BlindLemon wrote:
This guy, if this is his narrative about the album, has not REALLY listened to it once, has not let the music speak to him - be it shitty or good music, so all he can do is talk about the band, and how such a band at such a stage makes such an album. Oh-so-logical - it falls all into place, hardly a surprise, as this is really but a set of cliche conjunctions.
The NY Times has given it's review. Does anybody know what kind of rating they gave????? Is it a 5 star rating or something less than that??????
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