The Rolling Stones - A Bigger Bang

It’s not saying much for the quality of the Rolling Stone recent output when every time the band has a new release pending the debate centers around whether or not the band has one more "good" record in them. And while two decades worth of slop doesn’t necessarily qualify as ‘recent’ output to most, when you’re in your fifth decade of putting records out you’re probably older than the dirt beneath your feet therefore any reasonable measure of time becomes reasonably hazy.

Yet the simple fact that everyone (well, not everyone…these guys are sexagenarians remember, and just because you love ‘em doesn’t mean that kid in the Lifehouse t-shirt even knows who the hell they are) wonders aloud whether or not this one will be the next "good" Stones record (note that not a single foolish soul dares to hope for a "great" new Stones record) says about all you need to know about the state of things Rolling Stones in the new millennium.

So it is that A Bigger Bang - the Stones first dish of new grooves since the utterly forgettable 1997 offering Bridges to Babylon - comes to us in the year 2005 splashing around in the whitewash of a career wave that crested long, long ago. And yet people are still wondering aloud whether or not this is it…that A Bigger Bang is the big Stones bang we’ve all been waiting for since the boys slapped together a bunch of leftover tracks from the 70’s and called it Tattoo You some twenty-four years ago (which itself merely qualified as a "good" Stones record). Sadly, it is not.

What Bang is, however, is a far superior record to all of the swill that the band has set forth since ’81 (truth be told, it didn’t take much for the boys to top sludge like Steel Wheels, Dirty Work, Voodoo Lounge, and 83’s Undercover), and therefore qualifies it as, at the least, a listenable Stones record - for the time being.

The first and greatest discovery on Bang has to be how the Rolling Stones are so wonderfully capable of mimicking themselves. Not only are they good at it, they’re savvy about it, choosing to often revisit sounds that they used on the acknowledged ‘good-to-great’ Stones records of yore: "Rain Fall Down" falls off the cart that carried Some Girls to greatness; "Rough Justice" swallows "Brown Sugar" whole and treads Goats Head Soup waters; "She Saw Me Coming" features Emotional Rescue funk and sass; "Laugh, I Nearly Died" is vintage late 70’s Jagger cocaine-seduction; and "Back of My Hand" reaches way back for the magic of the band’s classic blues-infused 60’ tracks. In fact this entire record is the Stones covering the Stones, which considering the alternative, isn’t such a bad thing. Only the Keith Richards’ warbled "Infamy" seems to look toward a future instead of living for the past.

Yet, because the ‘new’ Stones have proven on Bang that they can imitate their ‘old’ selves so damn well an awful lot of people will be conned into thinking that this platter is at long last the ‘good’ Rolling Stones record everyone has been whispering about for nearly a quarter century. It isn’t. You only have to listen to the utterly awful "Sweet Neo Con" (yeah sure it’s a rip of Bush Jr., but it still flat out sucks as rock and roll music) and the painfully maudlin "Streets of Love" once to realize that there really isn’t much sincerity in the Rolling Stones music anymore – and that there will probably never be another truly ‘good’ Stones record. Ever.

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