"Foreign Tongues" is the 25th., studio album in the UK and the 27th., studio album in the US by the legendary English rock band The Rolling Stones, under Andrew Watt production, the album features musical contributions from Steve Jordan, Darryl Jones, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith, Paul McCartney, Benmont Tench, Bruno Mars, and Chad Smith, among others. It also features a song recorded with Charlie Watts prior to his death. So far, the album has released two singles "In The Stars" backed with "Rough And Twisted", and "Jealous Lover" backed with "Divine Intervention".
The album primarily consists of new material, with four compositions recorded during the band's last album, Hackney Diamonds including "Covered In You". The album includes material from band's final session with drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, as confirmed by Jagger at a press conference hosted by the band in New York City.
Foreign Tongues has just arriving just before Mick Jagger's 83rd birthday, and 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.
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’. 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. 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.
The album opener "Rough and Twisted" is a proper vintage raw 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 with 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. 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, Next comes the astonishing and powerful "In The Stars" setting the awesome tune the record will have.
"Never Wanna Lose You", comes with its Some Girls
funk shuffle and is perfectly serviceable with Bruno's
cowbell alongside with long-time bassist Darryl Jones putting in a solid shift, although "Jealous Lover" does this better. "Side Effects" is the closest thing here to the 90s Stones — is the clear low point.
"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. "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.
The third classic here 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. The great late 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.
Now 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 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.
So far, the album has received fairly good reviews and described Foreign Tongues as "a thoroughly
modern-sounding, occasionally political record that has the band
confronting the world around them and their remaining time within it, providing richness, energy and joy on offer here to make the case that rock 'n'
roll still rules in the modern pop firmament, and the Stones remain its
greatest advocates.
Foreign Tongue Track List:
1. Rough And Twisted
2. In The Stars
3. Jealous Lover
4. Mr. Charm
5. Divine Intervention
6. Riging Hollow
7. Never Wanna Lose You
8. Hit Me In The Head
9. You Know I'm No Good
10. Some Of Us
11. Covered In You
12. Side Effects
13. Back In Your Life
14. Beautiful Delilah
