Aside from the new album from the legendary Dinosaur Jr., this is another week that is slim on new records. Sufjan Stevens continues his installments of ambient releases that will culminate in a box-set in May (out in physical formats later this summer).
A Place to Bury Strangers reemerged this week with a new line-up and an EP on the way and we got our first taste of Flying Lotus’ new Netflix score. Beach House contributed new music to an interactive art exhibit in Las Vegas called Omega Mart and you can now hear some it in the short film, Marin’s Dream.
Finally, today marks the 50th anniversary of The Rolling Stones’ landmark album Sticky Fingers so I wrote a little bit about the album and its place in the band’s discography.
Albums:
Dinosaur Jr. | Sweep it into Space
Sufjan Stevens | Convocations - Vol. III Revelations
Alan Vega | Mutator
Songs:
Angel Olsen | “Alive and Dying (Waving, Smiling)”
A Place to Bury Strangers | “End of the Night”
Lydia Ainsworth | “Cake”
nasimiYu | “White Lightning”
Flying Lotus / Thundercat | “Black Gold”
Iceage | “Gold City”
Sons of Kemet | “To Never Forget the Source”
Bachelor | “Sick of Spiraling”
The Alchemist | “Nobles” (ft Earl Sweatshirt & Navy Blue)
If you’re a Spotify user, you can listen to these songs (and more from 2021) here!
As any rock and roll purist will tell you, there is an age old question that has dominated the conversation: Beatles or Stones? I will forever be team-Beatles, but I also won’t ever deny the greatness of The Rolling Stones.
In typical Keith Richards fashion, the Stones kicked off Sticky Fingers with one of his most iconic and instantly recognizable riffs. “Brown Sugar” is still without question one of the best opening tracks in rock and roll history and fifty years later, this firecracker still bangs. (Side note, if you haven’t turned this one up to 11 as you’ve crossed a bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn late at night, I suggest you remedy that as soon as possible.) By 1971, the Rolling Stones were the biggest band in the world; a title they’d hold for at least another year and one they’d battle over for decades to come. From 1968-1973, the rock gods were untouchable. As the Beatles broke up, a void opened and there was no one better for the job than the Stones. Throughout the ‘60s they were the only band that came close to the heights of the lads from Liverpool, but as the decade came to a close and the Beatles began to fight, the Stones took the opportunity to transition from a singles band into an album band and 50 years later, the world is still in awe.
Sticky Fingers is the third album in their run of instant classic and perfect records and this one is filled with some of their best work. “Wild Horses” is at this point a standard for talent shows and coffee house acoustic sets, an easy entry point into the group’s catalogue and a song so good that even after countless covers, you never tire of the original. It’s easy to always talk about opening tracks and in some many cases, bands will put the biggest and best track first on a record to guarantee it becomes the album’s signature song, but rarely (especially in the age of streaming) does a band also put a total smash as the opening to the second side of a record. The Stones do just that on Fingers when “Bitch” kicks off the back half of the record and once again sets off a spark that continues for the remainder of the album. Their influence from and love of the Blues is still present and, clearly, “I Got the Blues” affirms this with pure magic. “Dead Flowers” is another late album cut that is ripe with promise and pop sensibilities.
The group recorded a lot of the songs at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama and in their own mobile studio during the later half of 1970 and it’s clear just how much they were hitting a creative peak during this time. They’d follow this with their opus, Exile on Main Street, but Fingers was the band at their druggiest and sleaziest (which is saying something) and felt like the group really hitting their stride. Sure some of their most popular tracks came on records surrounding this one, but here the Stones found themselves free of creative control from their record label and finally able to be the band they’d been personifying for years. They even recruited Andy Warhol for the album cover which also continued to push boundaries, a favorite hobby of the group, given its crudeness, but now it stands as one of the best of all time. Original copies even had a functioning zipper that revealed cotton underwear, but it caused too much damage to the vinyl in shipping and storage.
No one embodied what it meant to be a rock star quite like Mick and Keith and by the time the ‘70s hit, they were already legends of their generation and inspiring everyone that was debating whether or not they should be a frontman or guitar hero. The Stones at the height of their powers is rock and roll to the core and Sticky Fingers is them in their prime. It was also a lot of firsts for the group who were about a decade into their career. It was their first to go to number one in both the UK and in America and the first album in their post-Allen Klein career (hence the freedom). It was the first studio album to feature Mick Taylor and the first without contributions from Brian Jones. It was the first album to feature their iconic tongue and lips logo and the group’s first album in the ‘70s; a decade they would define. While not a shift musically, it certainly was a new era in the band’s legendary arc.