Funny that the much-touted "reunion/comeback" album
Steel Wheels
followed
Dirty Work
by just three years, while it took
the Stones
five years to turn out its sequel,
Voodoo Lounge
-- a time frame that seems much more appropriate for a "comeback." To pile on the irony,
feels more like a return to form than its predecessor, even if it's every bit as calculated and
Bill Wyman
has flown the coup. With
Don Was
, a neo-classic
rock
producer who always attempts to reclaim his artist's original claim to greatness, helming the boards with
the Glimmer Twins
,
strip their sound back to its spare, hard-rocking basics.
The Stones
act in kind, turning out a set of songs that are pretty traditionalist. There are no new twists or turns in either the rockers or
ballads
(apart maybe from the quiet menace of
"Thru and Thru,"
later used to great effect on
The Sopranos
), even if they revive some of the English
folk
and acoustic
country-blues
that was on
Beggars Banquet
. Still, this approach works because they are turning out songs that may not be classics but are first-rate examples of the value of craft. If this was released ten years, even five years earlier, this would be a near-triumph of classicist
, but since
came out in the CD age, it's padded out to 15 tracks, five of which could have been chopped to make the album much stronger. Instead, it runs on for nearly an hour, an ironically bloated length for an album whose greatest strengths are its lean, concentrated classic sound and songcraft. Still, it makes for a stronger record than its predecessor. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine