Goats Head Soup

Every great band has the album that critics called a step down — and every great band eventually gets proved right. Goats Head Soup came after Exile on Main St., which is widely considered the Stones’ masterpiece, and it’s spent fifty years in that shadow. That’s both unfair and slightly beside the point. This is not Exile. It was never trying to be. Consequence

Recorded partly in Jamaica as tax exiles, with Jimmy Miller producing for the last time, the album carries the weight of a band running on fumes and still somehow delivering. In just four weeks at Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston they tracked eight of the ten songs. The speed shows — but not in a bad way. There’s a looseness here, a bruised quality, that makes tracks like Winter and Coming Down Again feel like dispatches from somewhere very far gone. And then there’s Angie — a number one single in the US, one of the most recognizable ballads in rock history, sitting in the middle of an album people keep calling a disappointment.

The 2020 remix by Don Was stripped away decades of grime and revealed the record’s vulnerable, autumnal core. That reissue recontextualized everything — it went back to number one in the UK almost fifty years after its original release, which tells you something about how the world eventually catches up to a record it underestimated.

We carry this one because the Stones at their most tired are still the Stones. And because Angie alone earns it shelf space.