The Stones Still Roll’n’Rock Rather Well on Hackney Diamonds
It’s not maybe the album we need. But it’s one you’ll want to hear
Deep Dive Album Review
There’s a good bit to be said about the first new Rolling Stones album, a good bit of it good. And one thing that it’s not – painful pun alert – is hackneyed. At least that’s how this seasoned critic and avid Stones mainliner since their very first singles close to six decades ago hears it.
On the other hand, the reviewer for Pitchfork, who I can be sure is far less seasoned than I am, says it’s “a bunch of hackneyed duds.” Which means he doesn’t like it much or truly understand the Stones as a musical entity, as the rest of his “review” unintentionally informs me. Memo to unseasoned rock critics: you can say you don’t like an album and why in a review. But it’s major fail to base your assessment on that. Judge the music on its own terms and within its obvious surrounding context (like the act’s previous work and the space they inhabit in the music and cultural zeitgeists. Pretty basic stuff).
At first blush, even while Hackney Diamonds is obviously the Stones, in many ways it doesn’t sound much like any other Rolling Stones album. And that’s a good thing, as it plays like one probably should sound like in this day and age.
I say good a lot in the first line above because that’s the word for this set: good. Phew! Not a disappointment, like their last studio outing, the immediately forgettable 2016 roots album Blue & Lonesome. (That the Stones made a meh album of the music that originally inspired them has to be just about their biggest failure ever, other than Altamont.)
My secret heart of hearts has long nourished a hope that the Stones would knock just one more out of the park – a fitting coda to a wondrous legacy. This is not that album. And I’m OK with that. There’s likely still time for them to really shine a bright light yet again, though it s a wee bit ominous to see pics of just Mick, Keith and Woody as the last Stones standing.
On the other hand, once again, much of this proverbial platter is the debut, in a way, of a new-ish and, yes, somewhat different Rolling Stones with bassist Daryl Jones and drummer Steve Jordan ably and distinctively holding down the bottom end. My hope for just one more killer Stones album has now shifted to pondering how the five might really hit their stride next time they record, and maybe we’ll hear something exciting and maybe even revelatory.
That was the big payoff back when every new Rolling Stones album was an event, another pivotal benchmark on the rock’n’roll trail, almost a living, breathing document to those of us who held the band both dead center and atop within our pantheon of esteem, all the way up to their last full great long-player, 1978’s Some Girls (which plays as wonderfully today as when fresh). What followed was a downward slide of diminishing returns.
Now, nearly two decades after their last studio album, the group has something to prove. And they do that on what may be the album’s best track, “Whole Wide World,” which, no surprise, is one of the two tracks recorded with Charlie Watts before he passed way. It’s a jet-engine-powered number whose oppositional lyrics are vintage Stones streetwise rebel rocking, potently delivered by Jagger with his trademark insouciant sneer.
The other corker here is “Mess It Up,” a hip-swaying slice of soulful rock that proves how the new line-up can cook up a classic simmering Stones stew. It’s followed by “Live By The Sword,” where we Charlie fans – like me, who spent a good deal of the last Stones show I saw in 2006 zeroing my ears in on Watts and marveling at how he was not just the band’s pulsing, snappy and subtly swinging heartbeat but also sketched the the blueprint for rock’n’roll drumming at its finest – can enjoy him counting down the tune one last time. The song also reunites the group’s founding rhythm section with Bill Wyman playing bass, and features wittily-rolling piano by Elton John. a not superfluous celebrity guest whose rollicking piano part would have passed muster with my near lookalike Ian Stewart, the band’s original pianist who became their minder and musical conscience.
Similarly, Paul McCartney’s muscular fuzz bass on “Bite My Head Off” is also not simply a star turn; he solos with finesse on the middle eight of the propulsive punkish number that plays like it could have been a Some Girls outtake. The atmospheric number where Keef steps up to the mike, “Tell Me Straight,” could have slotted nicely onto one of his three solo releases, which I collectively consider the best Rolling Stones album since the late 1970s.
All above offers good reason to hear Hackney Diamonds, even with its lesser moments. “Angry,” its opening song and first single, is a smoking, propulsive instrumental track, driven by Keef’n’Ronnie’s Siamese-twins guitar work. But lyrically, for the most part, it’s rather light and trite. The two numbers that follow are also-rans as well. Nice, but seem driven by the desire to have a contemporary hit that Jagger expresses in the latest Mojo magazine.
Same pretty much goes for the gospel-ish tune, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” which features two star guests: Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. The latter adds soulful organ and piano that enhances the track. Though Gaga is one helluva singer, she’s not the singer for this song. (Where, when you need her, is Merry Clayton, whose mesmeric vocals on “Gimme Shelter” raised the ante of that Stones classic into the stratosphere?) Much as I dig Gaga’s voice, by the end of the song I just wish she’d stop wailing. But Mick wants a hit, and Gags has hits in this new musical world.
The band brings it all back home to where it all began on the closing number written by Muddy Waters, “Rolling Stone Blues,” the source of the band’s name. It was a Waters LP that Richards noticed Jagger carrying when the two first met at a train station in the London suburb of Dartford. The track with just Keith on electric guitar and Mick singing and blues harping sounds like the two first united busking on Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue that same year, crackling with an authenticity that almost makes up for the cock-up of Blue & Lonesome.
Speaking of Jagger, he sings wonderfully here, and plays some damn fine harmonica. The MVP of this endeavor, however, is Ronnie Wood – by now the longest-running Stones lead guitarist – whose cool and economical riffs and leads on Hackney Diamonds are to my ears his smartest playing yet.
The album was produced by 33-year-old sonic wunderkind Andrew Watt, whose marquee credits range from Ozzy Osbourne to Justin Bieber to Iggy Pop to Miley Cyrus to Post Malone, to name some but hardly all. The Washington Post’s Chris Richards – a younger critic I always enjoy reading – notes how “he gives the songs a tangy sheen that they don’t quite need.” Point taken. But I like how Watt manages to get such clear instrumental separation with a band that plays live together in the studio and how he makes each player’s work shimmer without sacrificing the cohesive blend. Being able to focus one’s ears on the constituent parts is one of the rewards of listening to Hackney Diamonds, especially on the lesser songs.
Songs! They’re at the crux of why this album never blasts off beyond the realm of OK to pretty good and into the vibrant fireworks displays of their many timeless triumphs. The Glimmer Twins used to draw lyrical themes and lines from such sources as the current zeitgeist, decadence, hellhounds on their trail, twisted romances, the underground, Keith’s drug stash, rape and murder (it’s just a shot away) – edgy, daring and provocatIve stuff. Some of the topics here seem pedestrian in comparison.
If the World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band also hope to make one more album that lives up to that championship title, Jagger and Richards need to take their writing both up and outward a couple of huge notches. And need to say to themselves: never mind the record charts, here’s some more big bollocks rocking of the sort that made the Stones a musical gold standard that countess many have aspired to, some on occasion have equaled, but none have summoned up such sustained, consistent rock’n’roll brilliance as the band did in their heyday. Now that the group has tightened to seamless professionalism over decades of regular touring from their sweet slushiness of yore – what WashPo’s Richards niftily nails as “that impossible feeling of tight looseness and loose tightness” – they prove here that they still have the snap and muscularity to record a killer with no filler.
This album is not cut diamonds, much more like polished stones (yeah, I’m being quite punny here), everyday jewelry for daily wear. It plays better over succeessive spins, and does so nicely as a whole from start to finish. Hence it stokes this aging mannish rock boy’s hopes that the even-further aged Rolling Stones just might summon up one more timeless gem for the ages.
Let me and the other readers know what you’re thinking!
I go for Driving Me too Hard I think because it sounds the most like Exile. Whole Wide World steals the chord change of the verse from Iggy 5' 1
and his song has a tough chorus not an oddly cliche melodic one like the Stone song.
https://youtu.be/dnI6A_YUoDc?si=00L4JAmacUF6kfYC
Merry Clayton is still around, and probably would have appreciated the gig. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/beloved-background-singer-merry-clayton-enters-spotlight-rcna605