The Rolling Stones Shine Your Light

This recent release from Mayflower presents the sessions from 1969 through October 1970 generally known as Sticky Fingers Sessions (hence this collection s name) but that have songs that will end up further on in the Stones history from Exile through Goat s Head Soup.

Greeted with decidedly mixed reviews upon its original release, Exile on Main St. has become generally regarded as the Rolling Stones' finest album. Part of the reason why the record was initially greeted with hesitant reviews is that it takes a while to assimilate. A sprawling, weary double album encompassing rock & roll, blues, soul, and country, Exile doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new. Taking the bleakness that underpinned Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers to an extreme, Exile is a weary record, and not just lyrically. Jagger's vocals are buried in the mix, and the music is a series of dark, dense jams, with Keith Richards and Mick Taylor spinning off incredible riffs and solos. And the songs continue the breakthroughs of their three previous albums.

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…