The Rolling Stones Undercover of The Night

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…

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…

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 three different incarnations…

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."

Forty Licks, like Elvis' 30 #1 Hits, is a career-spanning compilation that wouldn't have happened without the unprecedented, blockbuster success of Beatles 1. Where Elvis' set is hurt by the simple fact that there are too many damn Elvis comps on the market, the Rolling Stones benefit greatly from the fact that there has not been any set that chronicles all their recordings from the '60s through the '90s…

To mark the band's 50th anniversary, the Rolling Stones have released a greatest hits collection. GRRR! features two new tracks recorded in Paris in the summer of 2012 (including the single "Doom and Gloom"), as well as a career-spanning collection of hits…