The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request
Released in 1967
Track Listing
Sing This All Together
Citadel
In Another Land
2000 Man
Sing This All Together (See What Happens)
She's A Rainbow
The Lantern
Gomper
2000 Light Years From Home
On With The Show
It always funny to read arguments by hardcore Christians who call rock music satanic and cite this album as one of the main examples. Of course, every argument like that is extremely flawed(understatement) and citing this album is where the argument really starts to fall apart because honestly, there's nothing satanic at all about this album except for the title. Sure, the music video for "2000 Light Years From Home" is questionable in that sense, but I'll look over that for the sake of criticizing the hardcore Christians(>_>). The whole album's a joke anyway. This is about as satanic as, say,
Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or
Highway 61 Revisited.
For a joke though,
Satanic Majesties is a pretty damn good album. Far from a "Grade-A" Stones album of course, but it
does stands as a "Grade-A" psychedelic album, no matter how many people say they hate it. But the haters mostly come from the Stones fanbase who are used to the usually sleazed-out garage rock sound they have. Not many albums have had the same effect on the ear as this has. And I couldn't really describe how this album sounds to me in words(mostly because I'm horrible at forming thoughts into words. No lie~) but if it helps any, I'd take this over
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band any day. And that's probably another reason why people say they hate it -- they compare it to
Sgt Pepper's so much. Honestly, it sounds more like Pink Floyd's debut(which was released about 4 months before
Satanic Majesties in the UK and two in the US) than it does
Sgt. Pepper's.
As you go through
Satanic Majesties, you'll notice that the Mellotron is a very prominent instrument here(at least, I think that that's a Mellotron. It really sounds like it.) and it seems to underline the whole "psychedelic" idea. And some of the songs are slightly muddled in not quite an unpleasant way. It appears as if this album was really planned out, but I guess with close to nine months of studio time, they had time to really fix it up. Actually, if you ask me,
Satanic Majesties probably had more effort put into it than other Stones albums, and it comes off as sounding polished yet still rough like the other Stones albums. But then again, the Stones can't really escape their roughness. It's been with them ever since they were formed(which was somewhere between the Big Bang and biopoesis).
Satanic Majesties opens up with a fun little sing-a-long that does a decent job of setting up the mood for the rest of the album, as it's both dark and playful. But the real fun begins with the bouncy(?) and almost alien-sounding "
Citadel". Think of "Sing This All Together" to be a rabbit hole and "Citadel" to be the little locked door that leads to Wonderland. Which is a pretty apt metaphor, since the song after "Citadel" is the strange "
In Another Land", a Bill Wyman highlight. And that's an appropriate name, because
Satanic Majesties is really like some weird, acid-induced adventure through some alien land.
The rest of the album is pretty consistent and holds up to the standards set by the first three cuts. All except for the bore-fest "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)", anyway, but that can be easily looked over with the help of a fast-forward button. But after that, it continues on as if that piece of trash was never there. There also seems to be tastes of foreign music here-and-there(foreign to America that is) which just adds to the experience.
Satanic Majesties is a masterpiece.
Other interesting cuts include: "
2000 Man", "
She's A Rainbow", "
2000 Light Years From Home" and "
On With The Show"
9/10