Metamorphosis (1975)


 

  1.Out of Time
  2.Don't Lie to Me
  3.Somethings Just Stick in Your Mind
  4.Each and Every Day of the Year
  5.Heart of Stone
  6.I'd Much Rather Be With the Boys
  7.(Walkin' Thru the)Sleepy City
  8.We're Wastin' Time
  9.Try a Little Harder
 10.I Don't Know Why
 11.If You Let Me
 12.Jiving Sister Fanny
 13.Downtown Suzie
 14.Family
 15.Memo From Turner
 16.I'm Going Down

 

If one were to conduct a survey of diehard fans and ask for a complete list of Rolling Stones albums, Metamorphosis is the one most likely to be overlooked. It is not the worst, but it is, in every sense of the word, forgettable. By the time of its release, the band had amassed enough material—scraps, demos, misfires, curiosities—to warrant a collection of outtakes. Metamorphosis exists chiefly to give those leftovers a proper place.

The listening experience is oddly bifurcated. The first half is composed largely of earlier recordings—material that could have comfortably slotted into the band’s first five albums. These tracks, while competent, never feel essential. They are polished to a fault, with the production conspiring against any real sense of urgency or spontaneity. Take Out of Time, for example. Drenched in strings and flanked by session vocalists, it bears little resemblance to the scrappy magic of the Stones’ early output. It is too clean, too dressed-up, and ultimately stripped of the ragged charisma that once defined them.

It is only with Try a Little Harder that the tone shifts—clearly the product of the band’s late-sixties phase, it bristles with more confidence and character. From that point onward, the second half of the album begins to resemble something more akin to a proper Stones record. There are flashes of humour, detours into genre exercises, and a handful of modest gems—none of which would have disrupted the flow of a stronger album, but here feel more like bonus tracks than buried treasure.

As with most archival releases, Metamorphosis is best appreciated not as a standalone work, but as an appendix. It is not a major chapter in the band’s story, but a footnote. For completists, it is a curiosity worth examining. For everyone else, it remains what it always was—a “nice to have,” but not a “need to have.”


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