You’ll get all the excitement you can handle sitting at home with all the new-old Stones CDs that have not-so-coincidentally just appeared. ABCKO Records has remastered every album up through “Let It Bleed” (1969)–the five years during which they evolved from scholarly cover band to cultural force: mystical skeptics, conscience-stricken immoralists, anhedonic party boys. You’ll hear in clearer detail the grainy guitars, Charlie Watts’s spine-snapping drums and Jagger’s faux-black, faux-hillbilly, faux-everything vocals. Some tracks sound brighter and crisper than you remember: the originals were mastered at a slightly-too-slow speed. Almost all sound as fresh as the day the Stones laid them down.
You can hear the full dawn-to-decadence evolution on “Forty Licks,” two CDs of touchstones from the beginning (“Not Fade Away,” 1964) through their last studio album (“Anybody Seen My Baby?” off the 1997 “Bridges to Babylon”) and on to four new pieces. The Stones haven’t had a great new song for 20 years–we’ll get to the exception in a second–because they’ve fallen back on imitating the forms they invented. And the mess has become pro forma: Keith laying on some dirty, disorganized guitar as another airless track fades, along with all memory of its trite lyrics and by-the-book hooks. But the Stones still have their moments, and they’ve saved the best for last: the teasingly mistitled “Losing My Touch,” one of those sumptuously depressing Keith Richards album-closers. He’s never used his weathered voice and Aaron Neville tremor to better effect, and his guitar solo is a 30-second miracle of meticulous incoherence. Unless you’ve got major holes in your collection, it’s about the only reason to buy “Forty Licks.” And reason enough.
