After trying their hand at original songwriting on Out of Our Heads, the Stones went for it, delivering their first full-on statement of purpose. Most of the songs here are menacing, slightly swaggered-up version of American blues and rock tropes: perfectly solid, but not altogether inspiring.
When the originals get original though, that's when things get good. Think and I am Waiting buzz with Kinsian details, and Under my Thumb and Paint it Black are relentlessly uncanny tracks. The latter in particular is simply unlike anything that came before it, terrifying all along its dense, rollicking route into darkness.
The Rolling Stones, at least on their early albums, are unlike most well-known bands. Usually the hits are the most normal, most accessible songs on an album that just happen to strike a chord, while the wierd stuff is buried circa track 9 and forgotten about*. But the Stones' strangest songs repeatedly end up being brilliant and well-liked, popping up out of seas of uninspired, samey filler. You can't help but wonder, if things turn out so well when they go for it, why don't they go for it more often? How do all your songs sound boring, except for the good ones? Where are all the swings and misses? It's like the devil is charging them on a per-song basis, and they're buying just enough to keep people interested. It's a weirdly believable theory, that 4/5
* corollary: if your weird, one-off song gets popular, that's probably the only song of yours that ever gets heard. Blind Melon comes to mind, but there're countless others.
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