"Rolling Stones - Forty Licks"

It's really kinda hard to mess up a Rolling Stones greatest hits collection. All of their big hits are pretty obvious--"Honky Tonk Women," "Satisfaction," "Gimmie Shelter," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "You Can't Always Get What You Want"...the list goes on. There are lots of them, and 40 Licks is a good sampler of the arc of the Stones' career.

The two-disc set eschews chronology in favor of creating a fun mix tape, juxtaposing early tunes with latter-day works. This works in the collection's favor most of the time--you get a sampling and smattering of all the styles the Stones have dabbled in, and you don't end up going on a run of four or five songs that all have a similar style (since several of the Stones' albums are genre exercises, in a way, this is always a distinct possibility--of course, the Stones have also evolved and changed over the years, going in different directions on whims. I mean, the Stones did some disco stuff. You can't tell me that's normal for a band that started out as a basic British Invasion/rhythm-and-blues combo). The differences can be jarring--putting "Miss You" and "Wild Horses" right next to each other is just downright weird. But for the most part, it keeps each style from feeling too repetitive or redundant, and that's a good thing.

The one problem with the collection is the inclusion of four--four--brand new songs. It's common practice to round out and pad a greatest hits album with a new song or two (Sheryl Crow did it, John Mellencamp did it, Tom Petty did it, though "Mary Jane's Last Dance" ended up becoming one of the band's best-known songs), but four is rather unnecessary. There were plenty of classic Stones songs they could have included instead--their cover of "Time is on my Side" or "Playing with Fire," both found on the old Hot Rocks set, or even the country pastiche of "The Girl with Faraway Eyes," or hell, even "Saint of Me" from 1997's Bridges to Babylon (a song which I felt was far superior to the offering from that album that does appear here, "Has Anybody Seen my Baby?"). It's not that the four new songs aren't good; they're actually quite decent, especially for latter-day Stones. But they're not really greatest hits, are they? It's just sorta frustrating to see them padding out an album that didn't necessarily need padding, and placing all four new tracks on the second disc really bogs the latter half of the collection down (especially since the second disc also contained the lion's share of latter day Stones songs already).

But this is a minor quibble, and it's to the collection's credit that you never notice the songs that could have been included. What you do have works very well, and is a thoroughly enjoyable listening experience. Now, if we could just get them to actually do a new studio album (something we haven't seen from the Stones since 1997's Bridges to Babylon), we'd probably be doing pretty well.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Rolling Stones, "Gimmie Shelter"