70. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (1966)

1. Paint it Black
2. Stupid Girl
3. Lady Jane
4. Under My Thumb
5. Doncha Bother Me
6. Think
7. Flight 505
8. High And Dry
9. It's Not Easy
10. I Am Waiting
11. Goin' Home

Oh, it's these guys again!

In the two years since their last album here, the Stones have gone through quite a bit of change. On their first album, Jagger and Richards only managed one complete song, and even that song was a bit of a Beatles ripoff. And now, for the very first time, the Stones have an album where they wrote every song all by themselves. They grow up so fast...

And they is grown, too. These songs are a far cry from the derivative blues covers and generic rockers of the early '60s. They've got a bunch of kooky instruments thrown into the mix, even a dulcimer! Did the Beatles ever use a dulcimer? Hell no. SUCK IT FAB FOUR!

The album starts off great with 'Paint It Black', a song that everybody in the entire world loves. The mysterious sitar part, Mick Jagger's melodramatic-as-shit vocals, the pounding drums and the meandering bassline...this song's got it all! It furthers the sitar's then-burgeoning status as the hippest new instrument in the rock set, despite the fact that almost none of them knew how to play the instrument properly.

The next series of songs I have always found very amusingly placed. First you have 'Stupid Girl' whose lyrics are misogynist and sniping and perfectly suited for the Rolling Stones. Then you have 'Lady Jane', which is an honest to God psuedo-Elizabethan ballad, complete with dulcimer and 'I pledge my troth to Lady Jane' and all sorts of pansy-ass bullshit (good song, though!). Then, as if you weren't confused enough, the next song is 'Under My Thumb', where set to a catchy marimba shuffle, Mick Jagger finally discovers the most surefire way to attract women: compare them to pets. It really gets stuck in your head though!A surefire way to set back women's lib: catchy songs.

The rest of the songs range from fairly good to not so great. Unfortunately, the record suffers from the overstuffed first side, as there's nothing all that memorable on the second half. 'Think' has some pretty cool fuzz guitar, and 'I Am Waiting' actually has decent sounding harmonies for a band that couldn't really do harmonies (not yet at least). And though I suppose 'Goin' Home' was fairly progressive at the time, being an 11 minute blues song, but it really doesn't need to be 11 minutes at all. It seems more like they just forgot to turn off the tape instead of the freaked-out blues jam I was expecting. There's just not enough to hold my interest. And I really, really wish Mick Jagger would shut up. 7.5/10