Album Club Guide #4

However overdue, a belated review is better than none at all, so if you can cast your minds back to Album Club #4's blues-rock-based revelry - where you might rightly have felt conned by the poster's green pencil pledge of blogged reviews - I will presently extricate myself from hock with the promised blurbs (below).

The Rolling Stones- Sticky Fingers (1971)
Being a Rolling Stone must have been taking its toll by 1971's Sticky Fingers, after court cases, jail, death, Altamont and persistent narcotics abuse. Despite all this they managed to create a touchstone in classic rock albums. It is, in fact, this refelection, the weariness, the snarl of breaking rebellion that makes Sticky Fingers so fundamental to rock's blueprint. the opening track towers, sexual and strung like your typical bite, Jagger barely noticing himself strutting on past the Beatles' demise. From there in in though, the swaggering is muted: the coarse drift of 'Sister Morphine', the flits and strains of 'Can't You Hear Me Knocking', the wistful echoes of Gram Parsons filtering through 'Wild Horses' (as simple and perfect a statement as can be). The 60s were dead and the 70s were best entered in a worn-out overdose of ennui. Mick Taylor, making his fully-fledged debut, folds in comfortably enough, his guitar glimmering in certain solos and codas and the Warhol-designed cover envelopes the whole thing in a much-needed cheek. After such a cohesive benchmark as this, who would've thought it possible they could follow it up with the equally key Exile on Main St?

The Dead Weather- Horehound (2009)
Jack White may or may not've played dice with Ol' Nick but he has without doubt become the closest thing to the blues since blues-rock was knitted for your birthday. His eye for an image and his instinct for scuzzed-up simplicity have already created two successes, and this week we look at the third attempt. As much a vehicle for ex-Kill Alison Mosshart, The Dead Weather brood, skeet and collide on swamp-water porches and fill stadia at the same time. The blues can be a tender creature or a blind rage and White has proven, in his most renowned incarnation, to be capable of both - Horehound is not shy on variety either but if you're looking for heart-warming nostalgia or anthemic lo-fi yelps then you better cling to your copy of White Blood Cells. Not that they should be compared o' course. This album does stride but without being cocky, it shows off a little wihout making you jealous, it's black enough to drink snakebites and black to, but it's not gothic. It's a confident stamp on a genre bypassed by bespectacled hipsters; hats off to it.