Doing chronological deep dives really allows me to appreciate how new material from great artists was received in context. Listening to 1973’s Goats Head Soup on its own is one thing, but hearing it as a follow-up to the four classic albums preceding it puts it in a different light.
For fans and critics expecting The Stones to build on the legacy they’d constructed over those four masterpieces, Goats Head Soup must have been a major disappointment. This isn’t a towering achievement. It’s… fine.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time with The Rolling Stones’ catalog, after coming to them a little late in my musical life. I know seven or eight of their albums very well, including the half-dozen classics they released between 1966 and 1972.
Somehow, though, I never got around to 1973’s Goats Head Soup. Maybe that’s because, as the follow-up to Exile on Main St. and the start of a half-decade period considered their first creative slump, it just doesn’t have the cachet of the rest of their work.
Meet Me In Montauk 