The overall air of heat, decadence and general malaise that pervades this double album can best be summed up by a stray line from ‘Tumbling Dice’: “There’s fever in the funkhouse now”. This was the Stones as raw and as defiant as you’d want them to be, amid glorious brass augmentation, with Gram Parsons a spectral but significant presence at the sessions, influencing its country blues leanings, particularly the slovenly swing of ‘Sweet Virginia' and ‘Sweet Black Angel’.
Muically, Charlie and Keef were firing on all cylinders, as is obvious on the vampirical ‘Rocks Off’, ‘Hip Shake’, the syncopated lurch of ‘Lovin’ Cup’ and a murderous take on Robert Johnson’s ‘Stop Breakin’ Down’. The album is decidedly downbeat, the band obviously suffering troughs of in-house bickering and drug psychosis, while producing work that is the very antithesis of the term easy listening. But check out the maudlin gospel of ‘Let It Loose’ and ‘Shine A Light’ and marvel that a band in such a state could produce such lasting magnificence.