The Rolling Stones
Exile on Main St. (Universal)

Often the hardest part about writing reviews for this column is rating the record in question. How many stars does the effort deserve on a scale of zero to five? It can be crazy-making: you’re about to give something a three because it feels like a three, only to remember that last year you gave a record you enjoyed slightly less a three-and-a-half—so now you have to crank this one up to a four. Which reduces the amount of room at the top for future records that you’ll end up really, really liking. Et cetera.

It’s weird science that gets weirder when faced with this newly remastered edition of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 classic Exile on Main St., featuring 10 bonus tracks that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards recently pulled out of the vault. Taken as a whole, the package gets a five, because it has to. No matter what the golden-aged Glimmer Twins grafted onto the double album’s 38-year-old frame, Exile itself would still earn the maximum as a grit-and-junk masterpiece of rock ’n’ roll.

But it’s the archival stuff that’s news, both exciting and worrying the countless fans who believe that the band did its best work in the Mick Taylor era, between 1969 and 1974. The very idea that some of the cast-off recordings included here have been spruced up with new lead and backing vocals and the occasional guitar track is enough to alarm purists. As with the director’s cut of a great film, there are just so many ways to screw up.

So what, if anything, do the bonus tracks bring to a record that doesn’t need any help? The good news is: plenty. If you’re a Stones geek, you’ll appreciate the alternate takes of long-familiar tracks. A prototype of “Loving Cup”, for example, takes on a deeper countrified glow in the absence of the horns and burbling bass that propel the original version. There’s also a run-through of the raucous album-closer “Soul Survivor”, this time with a reedy, F-bomb-pocked lead vocal by Keith that comes off like a karaoke night derailed by one Southern Comfort shooter too many. Coolest of all in this category, though, is “Good Time Women”, an accelerated version of the slinky classic “Tumbling Dice” with different lyrics and some truly greasy harmonica.

Then there are songs previously unheard, the most striking of which is “Plundered My Soul”, a swaggering tune in which a brand-new vocal by the 66-year-old Jagger feeds off rollicking sax and a sinewy backbeat recorded nearly four decades ago. Elsewhere, “Following the River” lays down the late Nicky Hopkins’s pretty gospel piano under weary reflections on ruined love and the cold realizations that come when “the drinks have all run out”. Both of these songs are good enough to have made it onto the original album, though passing resemblances to “Tumbling Dice” and “Shine a Light” would have caused some overlap.

Throw in the seedily funky “Pass the Wine” and the ethereal “So Divine (Aladdin Story)”, with its opiated guitar line and shadowy vibes, and you’ve got a satisfying epilogue to one of the best rock albums ever made. Instead of smudging their own legacy—something they’ve been doing diligently since Some Girls or, at the very latest, since Tattoo You—the Stones deliver music with all the warmth and callused toughness that was once second nature to them, making the raw, half-cut sounds they toss into the air land in beautifully rumpled heaps.

Download This: “Plundered My Soul”