Various: Exile on Blues St

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * *)

Proof positive that the circumstances which made the Stones' Exile on Main Street double album such a ragged classic — drugs, alienation, France, Keith Richards' work ethic — cannot be replicated.

This 10-track selection of Exile songs by mostly second-tier blues artists makes sense on paper but a lacquer of politeness, the extraction of sex and sensuality from the material, and an unaccountable earnestness kneecaps just about everything here.

Deborah Coleman using Keef's Happy as an elocution lesson was always going to invite a comparison she couldn't win, same with Andrea Re on Tumbling Dice. Not an unmitigated disappointment — Tab Benoit's Shake Your Hips is okay and the seasoned Joe Louis Walker delivers a brooding, Band-like Shine A Light — but really, someone should have locked them up for a week, and got them drunk and dissolute before turning the tapes on.

Label: Telarc/Elite