Some Girls may or may not have been the last truly great Rolling Stones albumEmotional Rescue and Tattoo You could also fight it out for that honorbut more importantly, Some Girl was the last Rolling Stones album where the band sounded truly comfortable with the times. In the 1980s, the Stones' efforts to stay current came off as forced and desperate. Since the '90s, their disregard for modern music has cast them as irrelevant classicists, trying in vain for another Exile on Main St. But for a brief window in the late '70s, the Stones were completely in sync with the times, maintaining their integrity as a rock band as they took credible stabs at disco, punk, new wave and Memphis soul. On paper, it reads like shameless trend chasing, but these new sounds genuinely revitalized the band, inspiring one of the Stones' very best albums.
Actually, it inspired a whole lot more than one album. The Stones' sessions for Some Girls yielded an abundance of outtakes and non-album tracksmore than any other Stones record, which is saying something. Many of these leftovers would be recycled on Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You, while others would become widely bootlegged.
For those who don't want to sift through all those hit-or-miss bootlegs, hearing Some Girls' most worthwhile outtakes became a lot easier this week when the music bloggers at Half Man Half Static posted the website The Secret History of Some Girls, which distills the best of the Stones' considerable 1978 archives into a neat, two-disc set, available for download or jukebox-style streaming. There's a ton of unreleased songs here, many of which are noteworthy for how much they sound like traditional, bluesy Stones jam sessions. Though how the band forged one of their most radical albums from these seemingly routine sessions is never fully explained by these archives, there's a lot or prime material here that easily holds its own against the band's recent output.
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