Some of us grow old: The Rolling Stones just get ‘Rough and Twist.’ It is quite delightful the band can still play on our nerves as well as on the strings of their instruments.
The 25th brick to the legacy, Foreign Tongues came out on 10 July, bringing together old friends and prestigious guests — such as producer Andrew Watt along with Paul McCartney, Robert Smith, and longtime drummer Charlie Watts for his final recording with the band before his passing in 2021. The album inevitably holds a certain heritage, but the Stones have the elegance not to turn it into a mausoleum.
Right from the cover, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood’s faces blend into one another to form a vaguely monstrous, resolutely rock’n’roll creature. It is not really about the three men themselves, but the entity they have shaped over six decades of riffs, excess, squabbles, and survival, to the point where the actual band has become inseparable from its own myth — as if the Stones were doomed to live with their legend grafted onto their faces. This is a rather provocative way of illustrating Foreign Tongues, which the cynics had dismissed as a recycling self-parody. But in the same vein as their 2023 album Hackney Diamonds, Foreign Tongues offers an unexpected artistic renaissance and breaks the curse of those bands we expect to lull us with their classics.
The album feels less like a groundbreaking release and more like the familiar wardrobe in your childhood home: you know exactly what you will find inside, but you open it anyway to slip on Grandpa’s old leather jacket with a guilty smile. ‘Rough & Twist’ opens with raspy guitars and a greasy blues, immediately followed by ‘In the Stars,’ showcasing the mischievous science of the killer riff. You might still prefer ‘Rocks Off’ or ‘Start Me Up,’ but comparing every new Stones track to their own history is like asking an 80-year-old sprinter why he no longer runs like he did at 25.
Age is neither a flaw nor a privilege. A few songs, such as ‘Jealous Lover,’ feel quite predictable, and many say the album would have benefited being shorter and blunter. Yet ‘Never Wanna Lose You’ offers some enjoyable disco-rock, whilst ‘Back In Your Life’ unfolds a chord progression so familiar it becomes comforting. Richards’s vocals on ‘Some of Us’ also bring a fragility that balances out Jagger’s insolent refusal to age. Fresh and fluid, the whole record rocks and makes you want to stick your tongue out.
The Stones may not escape the industrial machine that turns artists into brands, but Foreign Tongues is more than just a footnote, as the band continues to spit biting criticism of American politicians, and question the world around them and the time they have left to spend in it. Sharp and electric, it is the Stones’ mythical monster rearing up like a wild horse in a rush, making sure that the band’s approaching grand finale feels more like fireworks than a bonfire rekindled with a poker.
Image by Jim Pietryga – https://www.iorr.org/tour15/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44341280
