Every album is a comeback album if you drift far enough away from your popular sound. Preceding album Steel Wheels brought the band back together and is heralded by guitarist Ronnie Wood as the work which stopped The Rolling Stones from breaking up permanently. Five years later and the band would crack out Voodoo Lounge, the second of many releases which are fine enough. They let Mick Jagger scratch his contemporary desires itch, and the rest of the band fall in line without much fuss. You can hear that lack of magic throughout Voodoo Lounge, an album where the title is far stronger than anything featured on the album. Jagger and the band struggle to back up such a magnificent title with music worthy of the moniker, but they stumble over the finish line all the same. It is stock for their live shows, a chance to hear the band get back to what they did best of all, which is play mega sets across the globe.
Love for the band may be strong, but it has been decades now since their last great album. Part of the problem is that Jagger never quite retired the idea of chasing whatever was charting. They may return to their blues-rock roots even further than Steel Wheels allowed, but this steady foundation is no place for innovation. A slower drawl and clunky sound to opening song Love Is Strong hears The Rolling Stones commit the cardinal sin of being sluggish and uneventful. At a time when their peers were pushing against their typical styles, attempting to find a new sound for themselves after a murky decade in the 1980s, it’s rather shocking to hear The Rolling Stones cocoon themselves in blues rock inevitabilities. What worked in the 1960s and ‘70s works here too, but Jagger and the band are re-treading very safe ground here. Just look at the discographies of Neil Young and Paul McCartney during this period, two performers who had suffered through the ‘80s and reformed themselves in the 1990s.
Jagger and the band are content to rattle out the repetitive lyrical structure of a song like You Got Me Rocking, a song which fails to produce so much as a foot-tapping spectacle, let alone a song you can flail around to in some sweating, heaving crowd. Laid back sounds soon give way to lazier repetitions. Very plain songs like The Worst at least work but the album begins to nosedive and never quite picks up again after this. Early doors for disaster on Voodoo Lounge, which compared to that brief period in the ‘80s where the band lost their way is superior, but not by much. Loose writing is the problem here. Instrumental challenges and new fixations are heard on New Faces but it relies a little too heavily on the nostalgia factor rather than anything endearing or exciting. Soppy moments like Out of Tears are tough listens. They’re playing up the emotional factor but not backing it with lyrical or instrumental moments worthy of the heartbreak at the core.
Consistently flat is the sound Voodoo Lounge presents. It’s a step down from Steel Wheels and that only sounded solid because Jagger and Richards were back in the studio together, and on good terms at that. The threat of going wild, rather than the act of it, is what sinks I Go Wild. Sincerity still reigns through the lowliest of The Rolling Stones’ work but here is a real challenge from the band. Sweethearts Together asks a listener to stop living in the past and yet that is where The Rolling Stones is firmly rooted. The further into their discography you go, the more it becomes clear they are coasting off their earliest works. Fair enough, it is incredible work which few can say they came close to, but this need for Jagger to scratch a contemporary itch has not offered anything of brilliance in a long while. Voodoo Lounge doesn’t come close, and it’s a tragic realisation to make.
