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Musical Over Dose
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Since January 2002
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Name .:. The Rolling Stones - Hackney Diamonds
Genre : Rock
Source : CDDA
Type .:. Album
Artist : The Rolling Stones
Label : Universal Music
Titel : Hackney Diamonds
Tracks : 12
Playtime : 48:33
Size : 339,85MB
Encoder : FLAC 1.3.1
Quality : 973 kbps
[ Tracklist ]
01.Angry 03:47
02.Get Close 04:11
03.Depending On You 04:03
04.Bite My Head Off 03:32
05.Whole Wide World 03:58
06.Dreamy Skies 04:38
07.Mess It Up 04:04
08.Live By The Sword 03:59
09.Driving Me Too Hard 03:16
10.Tell Me Straight 02:57
11.Sweet Sounds of Heaven 07:23
12.Rolling Stone Blues 02:45
Total 48:33 Min
The eighth song on the 24th studio album by the
Rolling Stones is called Live By the Sword, a
succession of variations on the titular maxim about
dying by the sword. In truth, it s not one of the
strongest lyrics on Hackney Diamonds. You rather get
the impression Mick Jagger came up with the song s
central conceit, realised he d run out of ideas for
variations on the aforementioned titular maxim
around the end of the first verse, but boldly
decided to press on regardless. If you re deep in
the crime, you re deep in the slime, he avers. If
you live like a whore, you better be hardcore :
well, if you say so, mate.
Then again, you could make a convincing case that
the lyrics scarcely matter. Live By the Sword is a
raging blast that reunites the version of the
Rolling Stones extant from the mid-70s to the early
90s the drums were recorded by Charlie Watts at
his final sessions before his death in 2021; Bill
Wyman is on bass with the addition of Elton John
hammering away in the sideman role once occupied by
the late Ian Stewart. Not for the last time on
Hackney Diamonds, it recalls the moment in the late
70s when the Rolling Stones were briefly galvanised
by the arrival of punk, whether they would have
admitted it or not: it s of a piece with Some Girls
Respectable, Emotional Rescue s Where the Boys Go
and Neighbours, a refugee from the Emotional Rescue
sessions that wound up on 1981 s Tattoo You. Jagger,
meanwhile, sings the whole thing with yowling
conviction, even when you haven t got a clue what he
actually means, as per the business about living
like a whore. He sounds energised and engaged, a far
cry from the Jagger you occasionally heard on Stones
albums in the 80s and 90s, who didn t seem to be
singing so much as dutifully rearranging a
collection of well-worn mannerisms and vocal tics to
fit the songs.
And, in fairness, the lyrics occasionally essay a
striking line. If you live by the clock, you re in
for a shock, sings Jagger at one juncture, which is
among a number of lyrical references to the passing
of time ( is my future all in the past? asks Keith
Richards on his solo turn Tell Me Straight) and a
neat summation of the Rolling Stones more recent
recording career. It is 18 years since they last
released an album of original material, a pretty
staggering gap, even by the standards of a band who
clearly worked out in the mid-90s that the business
of touring had become completely uncoupled from that
of making albums: you no longer needed to do the
latter in order to make millions doing the former.
You might have been forgiven for believing that
2005 s A Bigger Bang would be the last album of
their own songs the Rolling Stones would release,
with 2016 s Blue & Lonesome a neatly cyclical
finale: the Stones ending their recording career the
same way they started it, with an album of blues
covers.
That it isn t may be down to Andrew Watt, who s gone
from working with Camila Cabello, Justin Bieber and
Dua Lipa to a new role as producer by appointment to
the rock aristocracy: Ozzy Osbourne, Elton John,
Iggy Pop and Paul McCartney, who apparently
recommended him to the Stones after sessions with
Don Was floundered. Watt isn t above catapulting his
more venerable charges into the 21st century he
had Ozzy Osbourne singing through AutoTune on last
year s Patient Number 9 and did the same to Elton
John on the Britney Spears collaboration Hold Me
Closer but he s obviously realised that what a
21st-century audience wants the Rolling Stones to do
is sound like the Rolling Stones.
The sparkle to the choruses of Angry and Depending
on You (both co-written by Watt) suggest the
presence of someone who knows how to make
contemporary hits, and there s a light modern sheen
to the production that prevents it sounding like a
determined recreation of the Stones past, even if
guest star Lady Gaga nearly hospitalises herself
trying to evoke the spirit of Merry Clayton, fabled
Gimme Shelter guest vocalist, on Sweet Sounds of
Heaven. But there s nothing resembling the clumsy
lunges for trip hop-inspired contemporaneity that
ensued when the Stones employed the Dust Brothers
and Danny Saber on 1997 s Bridges to Babylon and
Mick Jagger has been mercifully dissuaded from
calling once more on the services of British rapper
Skepta. Indeed, Lady Gaga aside, the star guests
stay off the mic and seem happy in the background.
McCartney contributes an uncharacteristically
distorted bassline to Bite My Head Off; both Elton
John and Stevie Wonder stick to the piano stool.
Behind its terrible title, which makes the new
Rolling Stones album sound like a pole-dancing club
in Clapton, and its abysmal artwork, which makes it
look like a mid-price hair metal compilation, what
Hackney Diamonds has in profusion is really good
songs: the ramshackle country honk of Dreamy Skies;
the appealingly languid Driving Me Too Hard; Get
Close, which hangs on a fabulous, quintessentially
Keith Richards riff. Clearly the sessions weren t
without their hiccups in a recent interview, new
drummer Steve Jordan complained that the songs were
too poppy , the guest stars superfluous and,
tellingly, that Jagger and Richards should have
produced it with his help but the end product
crackles with a sense of purpose: it s hard to avoid
the conclusion that, with mortality impinging on
their thoughts after Watts passing, all concerned
wanted the Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership
to bow out with something noticeably stronger than A
Bigger Bang.
If that was their aim, they ve succeeded, coming up
with that rarest of things: a latter-day Rolling
Stones album that requires no special pleading. A
sense of finality is added by the closing track, a
raw, acoustic version of the song which gave the
band their name, Muddy Waters Rolling Stone Blues,
complete with the kind of shiver-inducing harmonica
with which Jagger punctuated Blue & Lonesome and
Richards playing a 1930s Gibson guitar similar to
that used by the most legendary bluesman of the lot,
Robert Johnson. It s fantastic. How do we finish?
pleads Richards on Tell Me Straight, a question to
which Hackney Diamonds gives an emphatic possible
answer.
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