Album Review: The Rolling Stones – Blue & Lonesome

The Rolling Stones – Blue & Lonesome

December 3, 2018

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 0

 

You may have asked yourself at some point “Why is this site called Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews”? Well I’ll tell you why – because we got sick and tired of reading rapturously positive reviews for crappy product foisted on classic rock fans by lazy artists and greedy record companies that have no respect whatsoever for said fans. There is precious little honesty in most music reviews these days – I hardly ever see a negative review anymore, and when I listen to an album after reading the reviews I usually wonder if the reviewers even listened to the same album I did. When is the last time you ever read a bad review of an album by The Rolling Stones, or Paul McCartney, or Brian Wilson, or Bob Dylan, or Elton John, or any of the other gray-haired survivors of the golden age of classic rock? Is it really possible that all of the latter-day albums these hoary old rockers are releasing are so fantastic as to merit all the gushing praise they receive? Bob Dylan’s last three albums of “new” material have been raspy, rickety versions of old American pop standards, for cripe’s sake – the most recent one, Triplicate, was inexplicably a three CD set with less than 96 minutes of music spread across the 240 minute capacity of those three CDs. And these most recent Dylan releases all garnered rave reviews, even if Dylan’s croaking on “Some Enchanted Evening” from Shadows in the Night is enough to make you what to shove ice picks in your ears so you will never have to worry about hearing anything like that ever again.

You can’t trust rock critics to tell you when any of these guys have made a bad album. I’m not sure why they are so generous with their praise – I’ve wondered if they get kickbacks from the music industry, but I think it’s more likely that they know that their readers want to see their rock heroes praised, and that no one wants to read a review saying that Brian Wilson’s No Pier Pressure is embarrassingly banal and exceptionally brainless, or that Paul McCartney’s Egypt Station is full of half-baked musical doodles from a former genius operating well below his capabilities. They know their readers want these albums to be works of genius, so in the immortal words of The Kinks, they Give the People What They Want.  I think they tell us what we want to hear, and shame on us for letting them get away with it.

So you read the reviews for Blue & Lonesome, and you’d think the thing was the greatest blues album ever recorded by the greatest bluesmen ever. AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine gives it 4.5 Stars out of 5 and tells us the album is “something remarkable” and “a rare thing that will likely seem all the more valuable over the years.” Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times tells us it “rules” and is “often amazing”. Michael Bonner of Uncut enthuses that “magic happens” and that “intruiguingly, Blue & Lonesome feels like a major reassessment from a band – returning to the source and in doing so reminding us why they mattered in the first place”. In its five star review The Telegraph notes that “Blue & Lonesome is the album any Rolling Stones fan would have wished for” and “more than demonstrate(s) that the world’s greatest and longest serving rock band have still got what it takes”. The Guardian gives it four stars, opining that “Throughout, the sound on Blue & Lonesome captures the clatter of a largely live band loyally rendering the music of their heroes. Despite the title, and against the odds, it is an album full of joy.” Rolling Stone magazine, never known to get an album review wrong in its fifty year history, taglines its review “The Rolling Stones Reinvigorate the Blues on ‘Blue and Lonesome’”, and declares that the album is “dense with lesson, a reflection of the grip and wisdom that, for every bluesman, only comes with miles and age”.

Pish posh! This album straight up sucks. My seventeen year old son could see right through all of that, and he’s hardly a connoisseur of the blues. I put the album on while we we doing one of the fifty driving hours I have to do with him before he can get his driver’s license, and some of the words he used to describe it were as follows: “Corporate”. “Manufactured”. “Collecting a paycheck”. “Forgettable”. “Generic”.  He’s not wearing the rose colored glasses of desperate fans who are dying for new Stones music, or of reviewers desperate to be liked by those desperate fans, so he can see it for what it is. And it is a plastic, unmemorable, disposable rendering of blues songs that has no compelling reason to be listened to.

This website exists because of albums like The Rolling Stones’ Blue & Lonesome. You will never find a more cynical release than this one. It fairly drips with contempt for fans. When it was released we heard all about how the Stones recorded it in only three days, like that was some kind of amazing accomplishment, but let me put that into perspective for you: The Stones didn’t care enough about it – or you – to spend more than three days on it. They knew after not releasing new music for more than a decade their hungry fans would lap up any feeble piece of tripe tossed in their general direction, and they were right. And all the toady music critics, who are supposedly advising us against buying schlock like this, fell all over themselves praising this lazy – and frankly insulting – effort.

Now in the interests of full disclosure, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the blues, so I’m hardly an expert.  But I like me a little blues from time to time, and one thing I understand about it is that the blues should be played with fire, passion, and feeling. I watched U2’s Rattle and Hum over the weekend, and I thought B.B King’s performance on “When Love Comes to Town” illustrated this perfectly – after telling Bono he can’t play chords very well, we see him toss off the most emotion-infused heartfelt wailing blues licks while playing the song, and it was so cool you didn’t care if he never played a guitar chord in his life. B.B. was feeling it, and it showed. Listen to Jimi Hendrix’s blues classic “Hear My Train A Comin’” from Live at the Fillmore East – I’ve always been astounded at the way he never plays that cool blues rhythm part the same way twice, and at the same time singing like the blues were bursting right out of his chest. Another example – I saw Kenny Wayne Shepherd open for Van Halen one time, and it was like he had his guitar plugged into his heart, he was feeling, really feeling the blues.

You know what I hear when I listen to Blue & Lonesome? English guys who liked the blues when they were young but who are going through the motions. Playing the notes without feeling it. That’s how I feel about most of the English bands that played the blues in the 60s – they played the notes, but they never got that lived-in, well-worn, aching, raw and emotional coming-straight-from-the-heart vibe that made American blues so revolutionary. With maybe a couple of exceptions, I always felt that the 60s English bands played a sterile, stiff, emotionless shadow of the real blues – and The Rolling Stones were certainly not one of the exceptions. Part of how Hendrix blew Swinging London away – apart from his undeniably untoppable guitar skills – was that he played the blues like it was meant to be played. So on this album you’ve got four old guys who could never really play the blues with feeling even in their prime pumping out a tired blues album when they are fifty years past their prime – it’s a betrayal of everything the blues should stand for. Imagine some kind of amazing blues concert where B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd all come onstage and play the blues, then The Stones get up and perform some tracks from Blue & Lonesome. It would be embarrassing. If they were smart they’d slip out the back door before their set and hope no one noticed, rather than follow some real blues players on stage.

Take the blues guitar on the title song “Blue and Lonesome”. The music sounds like it’s played by a bunch of guys who practiced the notes, but never learned how to feel them. Or listen to the monotonous rhythm to “All of Your Love” – how the hell did Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood keep themselves awake playing those redundant rhythm parts over and over again for four minutes and forty-six seconds without falling dead asleep? This is no “labor of love” as some reviewers decreed – it’s a band going through the motions. Possibly the most unexceptional blues playing I’ve ever heard in my life. Boring boring boring. When in “I Gotta Go” Mick Jagger sings “I got the blues and I can’t stay here no more”, he sounds about as far from having the blues as humanly possible.

When Jimmy Page played “I Can’t Quit You Baby” on Led Zeppelin I it was a typical case of English guitar player “I can play the notes but not like I feel them”, but Zep’s version is about a million times better than the Blue & Lonesome version, at least they sounded like they were a little excited about playing the song, they at least tried to make it their own – this one’s a real snoozefest. Eric Clapton plays on this one, and sounds as bored as everyone else with the proceedings, playing the same kind of blues solo he’s played a gazillion times before in a gazillion songs and sounding like he’s painfully bored with the gazillion times he’s already played blues solos like this. There’s nothing exciting, nothing gripping, nothing really going on with this version of the song.

Some reviewers described “Little Rain” as if was some kind of mysterious, swampy, sinuous blues marvel, but for the most part I hear a couple of half-asleep old men playing a flavorless blues riff until the song kind of just fades out into nothingness, as if to say “I’m just going to quietly let myself out the door because I’ve overstayed my welcome and I didn’t really have much to say in the first place”. I find it telling the way the song just fades out without ever going anywhere, it reveals just how little thought they were willing to put into it. It just kind of trails off into silence without having accomplished anything, and they didn’t care enough about it to be bothered to find a real ending to the song.

Mick Jagger was always more of a frontman than a vocalist, to be fair, but his voice is uniquely unsuited for singing the blues. I mean, you hear him trying all kinds of different inflections to try and make his vocals interesting, but I don’t hear a lot of bluesy feeling in his vocals. It sounds like he’s trying to do something, but I’m not convinced any of it really works as blues. Have you ever seen a movie with some guy acting his poor heart out in a part that just isn’t right for him? That’s how I feel about listening to Mick Jagger trying to sing the blues on this album – he’s horribly miscast. He’s like watching Richard Chamberlain in King Solomon’s Mines – you can dress a guy up like a knockoff Indiana Jones, but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna be able to pull it off if the part isn’t right for him. It’s not that he isn’t trying, but his voice just isn’t suited for the idiom. His vocals have always had a pretty limited emotional range – mostly just leering and sneering and spitting out bile, contempt, raunch, and misogyny – and that’s it. On this album he puts the effort in, but just can’t muster much of a blues feel in his vocals. And I don’t want to hear about how The Stones built their reputation on blues songs early in their career – you are never going to convince me that Mick Jagger has ever been much of a blues singer, so don’t bother trying. Listen to the chorus of “Hoo Doo Man” – if you think that’s the sound of a bona fide blues singer, well you’ve never really heard much blues, have you? A shallow, surface-level blues vocal is all you can hope to get out of him – he sings like he thinks the blues is supposed to sound, but just doesn’t have it in him to be a real blues singer. The blues is more than just vocal affectations. I will give him this, though, he blows a mean harmonica, and that harmonica is the only thing that shows any real spunk across the whole album. He blows a much better blues harmonica than he sings a great blues vocal.

Notice how almost all the songs are less than four minutes? A great blues song can stretch out, and none of these songs do. It’s like The Stones couldn’t be bothered to give any of the songs more than a couple minutes of their time. This is no “labor of love” – this is “let’s get this over with and get out of here”. They give you just enough to get by, then they end the song abruptly. Some of the songs have a fast tempo, but don’t mistake a fast tempo for energy or excitement – there’s precious little of that here.  And note how there are hardly any guitar solos in these songs – guitar solos are a pretty big part of the blues for a guitar band, and The Stones were too lazy to come up with any on most of these songs, leaving Jagger’s frenetic harmonica to fill in the gaps.

Bottom line – this isn’t The Rolling Stones “reinvigorating the blues”. This is The Rolling Stones regurgitating the blues. This is The Stones putting as little thought as possible into blues songs they have known forever, The Stones tossing blues scraps to their hungry fans because they can’t be troubled to offer them anything really substantial. “Just Like I Treat You” is about the only song that has any energy or shows any spark – for most of the other songs, it’s just The Stones going through the motions. A blues song is more than just a pattern of notes, more than just a cool riff played over and over, it is supposed to be an expression of some kind of feeling – and the only feeling is get out of those songs is “where’s my paycheck?”.

You know what I hear when I listen to Blue & Lonesome? Mostly nothing but a great big CA-CHING, money changing hands and little more. I hear a band trying to do as little as possible to ship as many units as they can. And when I see reviewers heaping praise on this half-hearted blues outing, I know I can’t trust their advice to tell me which releases are worth my money. But Blue & Lonesome tells you two very important things – that The Rolling Stones don’t care enough about fans to put much effort into giving them new music, and that music reviewers don’t care enough about fans to call them on it.

It would be fairly ludicrous to claim there is any sense of honor in the blues. It’s not some noble pursuit single-mindedly practiced by pure artists and authentic auteurs whose sole motivation is dedication to their ancient and honorable profession. And yet, it is hard not to feel like this album violates the spirit of the blues – that in place of sheer expression of feeling, we are being given an empty shell of an album comprised of blues patterns and vocal posturing without ever really touching the blues. Authenticity is a word that probably gets tossed around too much, but this album is anything but authentic blues. Don’t dignify this album by calling it a tribute to the blues – it’s nothing but a cash grab.

Rubric Scores

 

“For some bands, the idea of making an album of formative influences might be considered a mere stop-gap – a minor addition to the canon to keep the wolf from the door. Intriguingly, Blue & Lonesome feels like a major reassessment from a band – returning to the source and in doing so reminding us why they mattered in the first place. Where do the Stones go from here?” – Micheal Bonner, Uncut Magazine.

“I think they can go to Hell.” – Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews.