THE  ROLLING  STONES   -   A  BIGGER  BANG  2005.

Let’s just get this out of the way: A Bigger Bang isn’t a good Rolling Stones album considering their age. It isn’t a good Rolling Stones album compared to their recent work. No, A Bigger Bang is just a straight-up, damn fine Rolling Stones album, with no qualifiers or apologies necessary for the first time in a few decades.

The sixteen songs on this disc, their first studio album in eight years, mark the closest collaboration between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in ages — they wrote many of them nose to nose on acoustic guitars while waiting for Charlie Watts to recover from treatment for throat cancer. Whether fueled by their notorious competitive camaraderie or inspired by their oldest mate’s brush with mortality, the results sound like a genuine band effort — loose, scrappy and alive. A Bigger Bang recalls the best things about rough, underrated Stones albums like Dirty Work or Emotional Rescue, though it’s also impressively consistent.

R.Stone magazine 5-9-2005

TOO OLD