Review: The Rolling Stones / Foreign Tongues

New albums by the great canon artists, those ancient musical beasts who invented this thing we call pop music and still have the temerity to peddle it, generally exist for one of two reasons.

The first is to prove to the public, or to the band themselves, that despite advancing years and an audience that clamours mostly for catalogue, they can still pull it out of the bag. 2023’s Hackney Diamonds was just such a record for The Rolling Stones. They had released only one album of original music since the 90s, lost a core component with the death of Charlie Watts, and retained only the central duo of Jagger and Richards from the line-up that recorded most of their classics. Any new album had a point to prove: we’re still here. We can still do this. We still want to do it. It worked, too. Hackney Diamonds was the best Rolling Stones album since Tattoo You, a deserved, revitalising success that showed the world that, despite decades of bickering, advancing years and the departure or death of most of the original band, The Rolling Stones were still capable of being The Rolling Stones.

Foreign Tongues has a different reason for existing. There’s nothing to prove this time. Having made their point once, it’s no surprise that they could make it again three years later. The 25th Rolling Stones album exists for the other reason artists like The Stones, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and the other 60s workhorses make new records: because they fancied doing it. It’s just what they do. They don’t need new music to expand the brand, promote the tour or make money. They do it because they’re a band and bands make records. “Fancy doing an album, Keith?” “Yeah, why the fuck not.”

Arriving just before Mick Jagger’s 83rd birthday, Foreign Tongues picks up where Hackney Diamonds left off. Again, Andrew Watt produces; again, the songs pull from every decade rock ‘n’ roll has existed in. The Stones, after all, have been there for most of them. It’s the sound of the best bar-room rock band there has ever been settling in and doing what they do. Rather well, as it happens.

The A-list guests are back too, in a way that could feel gratuitous but mostly doesn’t. Paul McCartney turns up on bass again. Robert Smith is in there somewhere, though you’ll be hard pushed to spot him. Steve Winwood, much more visible, plays organ across nine tracks. Bruno Mars, of all people, contributes an almost inaudible cowbell to ‘Never Wanna Lose You’, apparently hired as a form of funk insurance. Charlie Watts appears from beyond the grey veil on ‘Hit Me in the Head’, preserved from a session before his death in 2021 — among the record’s most satisfying moments, for reasons we’ll get to.

Opener ‘Rough and Twisted’ is proper vintage barroom-brawl Stones. Foreign Tongues contains three genuinely great Stones songs, tracks that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the classic era, and this is the first. Everything you want from the band is on show: there’s push and pull and swing, while Jagger honks on his harp and sings about Muddy Waters. The guitars are great. They’re great throughout, actually: Keith in one speaker, Ronnie in the other, crunching and jangling at each other. Richards has said that he’s the cake and Ronnie’s the icing, and you can hear that relationship on almost every song here — Keith laying down the bar-room riffs, Ronnie colouring around the edges. They are one of the few bands in which the rhythm guitarist is somehow the lead guitarist, even when someone else is playing the solos. Everyone follows Keith. Richards and Wood are the engine of the record. When it works, it works because those two are locked in on each other and everyone else, including the producer, knows to stay out of the way.

Alas, that isn’t always the case. Watt has an ear for what The Stones can still do at scale, and his instincts generally serve them well. But he also buffs off the grit, and the Stones are all about the grit. ‘Never Wanna Lose You’, with its Some Girls funk shuffle, is a case in point: perfectly serviceable, Bruno’s cowbell notwithstanding, with long-time bassist Darryl Jones (whose now been the bass player for the Rolling Stones for longer than Bill Wyman was) putting in a solid shift, but ‘Jealous Lover’ does this better a few tracks earlier and ‘Miss You’ did it much better half a century ago. ‘Side Effects’ — the closest thing here to the 90s Stones — is the clear low point: “I’m taking pills and I drink like a lush” is a great lyric attached to a song that never wakes up. A less enamoured producer might have cast both into the bonus-material bucket, the modern equivalent of ‘save it for a B-side’.

His affection also extends to the running time. There are 14 tracks here, several passing five minutes, and almost everything could lose a minute or so. Extended choruses and outros abound, undercutting an album that is at its best when it is leanest.

Watt’s more irritating production trademarks, though reined in somewhat, still occasionally spoil the party. Compression flattens the dynamics just when a song needs room to swing; the guitars are scrubbed a shade too clean for a band whose appeal is the dirt under the fingernails; and, most distractingly, the massed backing vocals on the bigger choruses are stacked and processed until they take on an oddly synthetic sheen that no gospel singer ever had. It’s the sound of a producer who loves the band slightly too much to leave well alone, reaching for ‘modern’ and ‘huge’ when ‘loose’ and ‘live’ would have served the songs better. He makes them sound urgent and punchy. That was always the brief and he delivers. But the Stones spent sixty years learning that the magic is in the space between the players. It’s annoying when Watt keeps filling it in.

Get past that and there’s an awful lot to enjoy. ‘Mr Charm’ has a gospel-backed chorus that flirts with ‘Gimme Shelter’ — dangerous territory, that — but otherwise heads somewhere different: rollicking, funny and tossing off a couple of the sharpest Jagger lines on the record. ‘Divine Intervention’ hides its Robert Smith cameo so effectively you’d never know he was there, but the song itself is a belter, a Some Girls-style boogie with a coda of soulful horns that opens it into something unexpectedly celebratory. Springsteen would not be embarrassed to find it on one of his better late-period records.

‘Ringing Hollow’ is the second of those three classics, and possibly the best thing here. Country Stones. A letter to America that isn’t angry. It’s disappointed, which is a much harder mood to sell. The band pull it off. They’ve been in love with the place since they were teenagers and have explored more of it than most. “There’s always a king trying to pick up the crown” is pretty pointed. Again, it runs long, but that’s an issue across the board.

The third classic is ‘Some of Us’, in which Keith Richards takes the mic and leans into his years. One of the album’s great strengths is that Mick Jagger, at 82, doesn’t sound like an old man. Another is that Keith does. And that’s what makes him interesting. It leaves the song unusually exposed. You can almost see the tears leaving clean lines down his grubby, craggy face. The arrangement pulls closer to Let It Bleed’s country-gospel than to any of his solo records, and Jagger’s harmonies in the final section provide one of the few moments here that genuinely raises the hairs on the back of the neck.

Another comes in Ronnie Wood’s solo on ‘Back in Your Life’, a long, weeping performance of the kind he is rarely given room to unleash. Jagger introduces it with a delighted “Come on, Ronnie!” Wood has said the performance was bound up with hearing of the deaths of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, and there’s something in the playing that knows it. The song itself sits at the ‘Wild Horses’ end of the ballad catalogue, and though it wouldn’t dream of comparing itself, Jagger’s sincerity steals it. It is not quite a fourth classic, but it may contain the album’s finest individual performance. He’s not phoning any of this in.

Charlie Watts returns on ‘Hit Me in the Head’, a fast, sardonic garage-punk thing on which Jagger plausibly sings about wanting to be knocked unconscious to speed up his own demise. Watts might be beyond the grave, but he’s right on the groove, and the pocket he creates isn’t your imagination. It sounds satisfyingly like the Stones because it is the Stones. Steve Jordan does a fine job elsewhere. But when Watts is there, you really can feel it.

Jagger wanted a ‘blunt, punk bass sound’ on ‘Covered in You’, and so naturally phoned Paul McCartney, the most melodic bass player who has ever lived. You have to hand it to Macca, though: he knows how to serve the song. The bass grunts. Jagger sounds properly annoyed about something — “you always try to give me bad reviews” does suggest he’s stewing about the Amazon ratings on his solo albums — but the intensity of the outro over a great little Ronnie lick is fantastic. Meanwhile, a cover of Amy Winehouse’s ‘You Know I’m No Good’ shouldn’t work. Jagger cannot reproduce the wounded self-indictment of Winehouse’s vocal, and Watt leans too hard on Mark Ronson’s polish where the track needed roughing up, but Winwood’s organ sounds great, Jagger’s harmonica is ace, and there’s more crossover between the Stones and Winehouse’s rootsy soul than the pairing initially suggests.

Foreign Tongues closes, as Hackney Diamonds did, with a cover from the band’s oldest heroes. That record signed off with Muddy Waters’ ‘Rolling Stone Blues’; this one goes with Chuck Berry’s ‘Beautiful Delilah’, a song the Stones were playing on the radio in 1964. It’s intimate, acoustic-led and deliberately vintage, with slide guitars drenched in reverb. It does smack a bit of ‘look at us, we’re still keeping it real’, which is the one thing the Rolling Stones absolutely don’t need to do. They’ve earned being whoever they want to be. But it’s a hard heart that doesn’t enjoy it. If this turns out to be their last album, which seems unlikely but is theoretically possible, closing with Chuck Berry, whose ‘Come On’ became their debut single, creates a satisfying and presumably intentional full-circle moment.

It’s almost certainly not the last Stones album; Jagger says he’s already writing the next one, and there’s no particular reason to disbelieve him. What Foreign Tongues is, meanwhile, is the sound of a band with nothing left to prove making a record anyway — and, when it counts, sounding as though they wouldn’t want to be doing anything else. They didn’t need to make this. They did. That’s plenty.

Review by Marc Burrows. Foreign Tongues is out today.

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