SuperHeavy

If the songs sometimes feel a bit undercooked, the spirit is dazzling.

This collaboration between one unequivocal superstar and four bright lights from disparate fields--Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman--yields enough inspired results to ward off fears of any cross-cultural train wrecks.

If SuperHeavy never quite answers that question [What the f--- is going on?], the group certainly has fun dodging it in bluesy soul-rock jams smeared with reggae grooves and Bollywood strings.

The quintet's debut is pretty good fun, fusing Stones-y raunch with brash Caribbean rhythms.

At its least enjoyable, however, you're struck--not for the first time in Jagger's extracurricular oeuvre--by a sense of star-studded pointlessness.

Perhaps if the album actually had some kineticism to its eclecticism, or at least a hook or a tune, it would earn its wannabe evangelism, but the untrammeled indulgence turns this into a gaudy multicolored circus.

[Songs swerve] between undistinguished reggae, so-so pop and indistinct blues-rock. [Nov 2011, p.92]

"SuperRandom" might be a better name. [Nov 2011, p.98]

An almost total lack of good songs constitutes the album's basic problem. Once that's understood, the record becomes sort of entertaining: gaudy, vacuous, densely mannered.

The sad fact about supergroups is that they are rarely the result of any musical imperative. This is painfully confirmed on the debut offering from the alliance of Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A R Rahman, on which the assembled talents cast around for a style of their own without ever unearthing the natural chemistry on which great bands rely.

Rather than synthesizing these various styles, they sound like they're working at cross-purposes, with every component so errantly fitted with the rest that SuperHeavy sounds schizophrenic.

Most of SuperHeavy is frankly unlistenable, lacking even the professionalism and solid chops of late-period Stones records.