The Rolling Stones – 'A Bigger Bang' (Virgin) Released 05/09/05

Now into their fourth decade it is inevitable that The Rolling Stones brand has become more prominent than the actual music. The famous lips logo, suitably placed in the album’s art-work, is perhaps just as well recognised as any Stones song and ‘A Bigger Bang’ serves simply to breathe a little more life into this mammoth career. A career in which albums will never again be genre defining masterpieces, but simply serve as a creative outlet for Mick, Keith and co’s remarkable stamina and a way of promoting yet another gigantic world tour. 

There is very little else within the confines of rock and roll left for The Stones to explore and ‘A Bigger Bang’ offers nothing new, resurrecting ‘Exile on Mainstreet’ era blues rock on ‘Rough Justice,’ ‘Oh No Not You Again’, and the rootsy ‘Back of my hand.’ The latter a great, stripped down dirty slide guitar jam in which The Stones appear most comfortable and adept. Elsewhere ‘Angie’ style ballads ‘Streets of Love’ and the Tom Waits influenced ‘This Place Is Empty’ support the attempts at experimentation as on the funky, Prince esque ‘Look What The Cat Dragged In’ and bizarre’ hints of hip hop on the rhythmic ‘Sweetneocon.’

However the majority of A Bigger Bang simply drifts along offering very little but an insight into the fact that Mick, dangerously close to rivalling sea turtles as the oldest living creature on Earth, appears to be as horny as a stag let loose on stag-ette island after twenty years in solitary. The opening lines of curtain raiser ‘Rough Justice’ outline how “One time you were my baby chicken, Now you’ve grown into a fox, Once upon a time, I was your baby rooster, now I’m just one of your cocks.” You can almost hear old Lizzie wrenching the knighthood from his bony g.php.

And so it is that at times ‘A Bigger Bang’ is the uncomfortable equivalent of listening to your drunken granddad trying to re-capture his formative years by playing the piano for four hours straight. When all you can do is feign interest and comfort him with a few half-hearted “well done” gestures, listening to mid song banter about how he used to be in a rock and roll band and once knew a guy that knew a guy who almost went out with Twiggy, “of course you did Granddad, now sit down look it’s the cartoons, you like them don’t you?” But of course this is The Rolling Stones, the greatest rock and roll band in the world ever and the old magic raises its head every now and then to remind us just why they are still here. The touching ‘Laugh I Nearly Died’ outlines the futility of material wealth without companionship, how despite living a dream it is often the simple things in life that bring the most joy “I’m living in a fantasy, but it’s way too far, this kind of loneliness, is way too hard."

This is no excuse, however, for geriatric filth like ‘This Place Is Empty’ on which Jagger croons as subtly as a rubber lipped bull in a china shop “Come on in, bare your breasts, and make me feel at home,” Jeeesus put it away Mick.