The Rolling Stones: Goats Head Soup Super Deluxe Edition

Show of hands, please—how many of you rate August 1973’s Goats Head Soup as your favorite Rolling Stones album? Anyone? No? Can’t say I blame you.

- By Mike Mettler

Any record following The Stones’ May 1972 career-defining double-album masterpiece Exile on Main St. would have an impossibly high bar to overcome, no matter what made the final cut. Fact is, goat's Head Soup had a master chef’s menu stacked against it from the outset. And time has very much not been on its side, as Goats Head Soup has long served as a relatively underappreciated entry in The Rolling Stones’ somewhat uneven mid-1970s studio-album canon.

However, thanks to a new multidisc box set, Goats Head Soup has been served up for a well-deserved auditory re-assessment. As is often the case with deluxe reissue campaigns these days, Goats Head Soup actually appears in a wide variety of formats, including single LP and CD, double LP and CD, and as the ultimate crown jewel—a four-disc Super Deluxe Edition box set that houses three CDs and one Blu-ray, the latter with a stellar Dolby Atmos mix courtesy the irrepressible Giles Martin. (Note: If you don’t yet have Atmos, the surround mix will defer to either 24-bit/96kHz DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 or 24/48 Dolby TrueHD 7.1 accordingly—even though, for some unknown reason, the BD’s on-screen menu doesn’t show you these options.)