"Sister Morphine", the heart of guitarist Mick Taylor's first full studio album with the Stones, doesn't get brought up as often as "Brown Sugar" or "Wild Horses". But it's one of the most vivid, horrifying songs about drug abuse ever recorded--as Mick Jagger sings "from my hospital bed," the ringing guitars of Taylor and Keith Richards build to full catharsis behind him. On that and lighter songs ...
One of ZZ Top's great gifts is its concision; even in the side-long-jam era of the 1970s, the Texans almost always fit 10 cuts on their albums. Surveying two decades of their output, Greatest Hits isn't the perfect overview you might expect, but it's still a pretty darn good driving album. The disc goes easy on the pre-Deguello stuff surveyed on their earlier best-of, and seems to ...
Their self-titled debut, The White Stripes, is probably the rawest album to date from Meg and Jack. With their own stomping version of blues classic "Stop Breakin' Down" (Robert Johnson), the passionate railings of "The Big 3 Killed My Baby" and the sudden blues breakdown of "When I Hear My Name", this is the Stripes in their most shambolic, inspired state. Much of the album may be Jack ...