The Rolling Stones Emotional Rescue

There's a certain smarmy charm in the Rolling Stones titling a compilation of their work from the second half of the '70s Sucking in the Seventies – it seems a tacit admission that neither the decade nor the music they made in that decade was all that good, something that many critics and fans dismayed by the group's infatuation with glitzy disco and tabloid grime would no doubt argue…

Universal's 2018 set The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971-2016 isn't the first time the Rolling Stones] post-Decca catalog has been boxed up. Back in 2010, all the albums up to 2015 (which means it didn't include 2016's blues record Blue & Lonesome) were offered in a set that was a companion to the similarly limited-edition box The Rolling Stones 1964-1969. In a sense, the 2018 set functions as a cousin to ABKCO's The Rolling Stones in Mono – a 2016 box containing mono mixes of all the material the Stones officially released on Decca – but where that set was issued on both CD and LP, The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971-2016 is, as its title suggests, explicitly designed as a vinyl package…

Once simply viewed as a ramshackle overview of the Rolling Stones' decidedly uneven career throughout the '70s and into the early '80s, Rewind (1971-1984), ironically enough, is now also considered something of a collector's item since going out of print. And let's not forget that a Stones collection, however imperfect, is still bound to showcase some of the greatest rock & roll tunes ever recorded, and in this case the offerings include everything from "Brown Sugar" to "Angie" to "Miss You" to "Start Me Up," etc., etc. Of course, all of these and many, many more are now represented in the 2002 Forty Licks set, consigning Rewind to its bizarre afterlife as a rarity – go figure.

If it feels as if Honk treads familiar ground, it's because it does. Arriving seven years after the career-spanning Grrr! – a compilation available in a variety of iterations, all spanning from the earliest years to the 2010s – Honk focuses squarely on the music the Rolling Stones made after leaving London/Decca, a catalog that now resides with Abkco. In other words, its ground zero is "Brown Sugar," a staple that arrives just after "Start Me Up" kicks off the double-disc set. Such sequencing indicates how Honk bounces through the years, letting the '70s sit next to the '80s, finding space for latter-day songs that only showed up on previous greatest-hits albums (there have been five since 1984), and shining the spotlight on such excellent latter-day cuts as "Rough Justice."

Graced with cover art of a grotesque gorilla sporting the Stones' trademark leering lips, GRRR! doesn't quite have the classy veneer usually associated with a 50th anniversary collection. Frankly, that's a good sign for the Rolling Stones: they're celebrating their half-century together but refusing to take themselves too seriously, even when they're assembling a mammoth retrospective that's available in two wildly different incarnations…

"Rock and a Hard Place" is a song by the Rolling Stones from their 1989 album Steel Wheels. It is the second single from the album, and remains to this day the most recent Billboard top 40 hit by the band…