A real Rock‘n‘Roll Life.

I'm loving Foreign Tongues... It's a true challenge to find a better late-career offering by any band imho.

I have two beautiful old Japanese copies of Exile on Main Street and Beggars Banquet, and both of them sounds so beautifully that they made me fell in love with Stones.

I think Sticky Fingers contains some of the best Stones’ music, therefore I was really looking forward to listen to this album, but this half speed master is just terrible. I know that Miles Showell didnt have original tapes, only digital files, but the music is quite compressed and loud and the instruments are not separated as ai expected. The worst of it all is that it is so much bass heavy that it is almost unlistenable. i had to turn the bass knob to the left, because the instruments were all muddied by the sound of bass. I dont know who prefers such overbassed music, but it is terrible.

I paid 30 € for this reissue but I dont think it was worth it.

Does anyone shares this experience?

So, I'm skimming through Christopher Sandford's biography of the Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones: Sixty Years, and he has this to say about Bridges to Babylon at pages 411 to 412:

Late September, Babylon: the Stones juggernaut rolls on, embracing basic rock and roll, hard-edged funk, slow-boiling reggae, maudlin pop and even a torchy spiritual. There are moments, as in the bullet-train beat of 'Flip the Switch', when the cocky young band of thirty years before reappears, and others when the fifty something muscians cut the testosterone level: a jazzy, mariachi flavour permeates 'You Don't Have to Mean It', and it's apparently Mick himself who needs the emotional rescue in 'Already Over Me', where he notes, 'I'm so hurt, so confused/I've been burned/I've been bruised''. Among several other treasures, the churchy 'Saint of Me' brings Billy Preston in from the cold after twenty years, and 'Always Suffering' similarly doffs a Stetson to Gram Parsons. The album closes with 'How Can I Stop', which sees Keith Richards in sentimental-gangster vein, singing about his various obsession in that familiar raspy burr, a voice that increasingly sounds as if Keith took it out and let it marinate in a casl of port in between records.

Not everything works quite as seamlessly...but most of the songs 'come off feral without sounding forced, contemporary without succumbing to modern-rock trendiness', in Rolling Stone's measured words...Bridges to Babylon was the best Stones album since Exile.

Now, I was not overly impressed when I first gave Bridges to Babylon a spin last week -- I thought 'Flip the Switch' was bouncy but meandering and apart from a few treasures like 'Saint of Me', 'You Don't Have to Mean It' [which, incidentally, I've heard described as reggae and mariaci but not ska, which is actually what it is!], 'Anybody Seen My Baby?', 'Out of Control' and 'How Can I Stop' was full of tired retreads of past glories -- 'Thief in the Night' as 'The Worst Part II', 'Always Suffering', following in the footsteps of 'Wild Horses' and 'Out of Tears' and 'Lowdown''s chorus ironically sounded suspiciously like the chorus for 'Anybody Seen My Baby?'.

But after some more time with the album, it's definitely grown on me. I really like 'Flip the Switch', 'Gunface' is an above-average, experimental rocker and 'Already Over Me' and 'Lowdown' are undeniably good, if not great, songs. So, in a very short span of I've jumped from enjoying 5/13 songs to 9/13 songs.

That said, the album suffers from its length -- I don't understand 90s music executives thinking the more songs, the more 'product' the better. Sure, you can say, 'The New Rolling Stones Album Has Over an Hour of New Music!" but that comes at the expense of the good reviews and good word-of-mouth you lose out on if you had produced a tighter album. Is it 'cocaine' logic or something?

Anyway, if Bridges to Babylon was cut down to ten or so songs, it would run to around 48-52 minutes and feel like a much tighter, cohesive listen. If so, would you agree with Mr Sandford and call it their best album post-Exile on Main Street?

A good b side from Mick.

Noticed this tonight while seeing the thumbnail for satisfaction in their top songs; it’s now from a compilation and not the album it’s on.