Doom And Gloom Is Good News, It’s A New Stones Record

After fifty years, you’d expect The Rolling Stones to be alive, awake and savvy at marketing. In preparation for their half-hundred year celebration, the compilation album, GRRR! (despite rumors, not the sound Mick and Keef make when they have to be in the same room together) will feature two new songs. Doom and Gloom is the first release. It’s an old-fashioned Stones tune. It sounds like something they left off Exile on Main Street or Sticky Fingers, added a line a killing a horde of zombies, and decided before they passed on, soon, we should hear this sonic canon.

I know. Dude, it’s good. Keith Richards still has “it”. Maybe “it” is muscle spasms from drug withdrawal, perhaps he’s just an evolved zombie, but Keef shreds on this tune. Ron Wood’s rhythm guitar is appropriately dirty too.

It’s weird to listen to, though. As much as I know I’ll be driving around with this blaring, Mick Jagger’s vocals sound stilted, almost misplaced. I love his harmonica playing, but maybe the real majic of Exile On Main Street was the fact that Mick was high and unable to totally enunciate. His performance here is too clean. It doesn’t match his band’s reckless abandon.

With one of the most popular television shows, Walking Dead, starting this month, the line at the beginning about killing zombies gives Doom and Gloom plenty of advertising possibilities. You should hear and see this song, well, everywhere. Shotguns won’t stop it.

For rock fans, like me, I’m perplexed at my happiness that seventy-year-old men are making some of the better music in 2012. Doom and Gloom may be the third or fourth best song I’ve heard in the past ten months.

GRRR!, with its cheeky Gorilla on the cover  will be out November 12th. Doom and Gloom hit the internets yesterday. It nothing else, Doom and Gloom matches a moment in time, enough, to make us feel good about dirty guitar licks, harmonica wail, and Mick trying too hard. As much snark as I can generate for this money grab, I’m pretty sure they’ve convinced me to ask for it from Santa Claus.

*****all images from www.rollingstones.com ******