The Rolling Stones
Their Satanic Majesties Request

THE REVIEW

The wind of psychedelic love was truly blowing magically in the golden years of 1966-1967, and anyone with a hint of imagination managed to expand it to the extreme, ignoring everything that was conventional, pre-established, obvious… in a word, old. Imagine the mystical evocative effect it had on brilliant minds like those of Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards… okay, even for me, it's an almost impossible task to even think of putting myself in the shoes of the two aforementioned characters. But luckily, our imagination can be stimulated by the lysergic tracks of this amazing psychedelic masterpiece created by the Rolling Stones.

Click… play, if unfortunately, like me, you only have the CD… “Sing This All Together” is a vaudeville in the best British tradition, disfigured by the sharp sarcasm of which the two were capable and masters… and after the playful escapade, the Stones magically introduce us to their “Citadel”, which sounds like a place inhabited by elves, sprites, and gnomes, where everything is rarefied, and daylight seems never to want to go away… and they immediately explain that this wonderful little town is “In Another Land”. The first masterpiece of this album is “2000 Man”, where multi-colored kaleidoscopic sounds are painted, embracing the psychedelic folk of Donovan, freak-beat interludes, and a quirky and deviant pop, much like the best of the Kinks. “Sing This All Together (See What Happen)” is their “manifesto of lysergic avant-garde” where they pay no heed to the real dimensions of space and time and indulge in sound experiments, which now recall the free-form of Faust (which occurred only half a decade later), now an as yet unwilled form of the 70s dance, now the search for our ancestral and cerebral origins… all condensed into eight cathartic minutes and a half. With “She’s A Rainbow”, the Rolling Stones craft one of the absolute masterpieces of psych-flower-pop, a song about the future redemption of the female condition, which becomes a poetic elevation to a radiant being. “The Lantern” is a humble folk-blues-psychedelic track that, in my humble opinion, is heavily influenced by the entrance onto the scene of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, to whom they seem to want to give a pass. “Gomper” is the restless English gaze at the window opened by Eastern philosophies, which expanded their mysticism towards the West. But the journey absolutely cannot end without an interstellar voyage to “2000 Light Years From Home”, where the Stones mix acid-induced mental trips with an experience outside our galaxy, with a sound carpet in the form of seminal space-rock (which I believe the Hawkwind memorized), before Jagger, dressed as a fairground barker, gives us his indispensable advice, filtering his voice through a megaphone… so as to attract more people to the last “On With The Show”...

Often this (master)work has been heavily battered by the hardcore and pure fans of the Stones, who always wanted them bluesy, murky, and mean… obtuse (the fans). Just the photo on the cover is worth the price of admission.