1001 Albums Summary

Relisten for me, as I know this album well. Widely considered the pinnacle achievement by the world's greatest rock and roll band, "Sticky Fingers" has a reputation that sort of precedes it, almost as if its universal acclaim goes without saying. But while it is obviously a classic, I would rank it at the bottom of the "perfect Golden Age Stones albums" pile behind the likes of "Exile on Main Street", "Let it Bleed" and "Beggars Banquet." I guess I'm in the minority of hipsters who believe that the band really lost something after the death of Brian Jones, and that this album feels like it's missing a lot of ornate instrumentation and psychedelic ideas that made their late 60s albums so legendary for me. It's still good, and the engine that makes the band the untouchable powerhouse of chemistry that it is is still very much here in the form of Jagger and Richards' songwriting and the Mick Taylor lineup's raunchy, bluesy chemistry. But a lot of the songs here just feel like overblown filler compared to their best work, including "Sway", "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (listening to the Kinks' "Australia" from Arthur really ruined this song and its jazzy jam coda for me), "Bitch" and "Sister Morphine". I even think "I Got the Blues" is a little bare, and feels like it's missing some of that 60s special sauce in the production and instrumentation. This all being said, there are enough bangers here to make this a great experience: "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses" are just vintage Stones at their best, up there with anything they did in the 60s, and "Dead Flowers" and "Moonlight Mile" are an incredible closing couplet. "You Gotta Move" is also the band at their most authentic, blues-loving selves. But the Stones, while being incredibly innovative in their own right, could also be trend-chasers, and from the Warhol artwork to the bloated, rockist textures that upstage the songwriting, they feel like they're starting to chase their own trend here. Hey, just my opinion. 3/5