The review below refers to the original Animal Tracks album from 1965 with a totally different song collection. This one looks like a compilation of the Eric Burdon & the Animals hits from 1966-68.

A couple of years ago at a party in Virginia I was dancing with a beautiful European girl to the Animals' "For Miss Caulker" song. The lady was just a putty in my hands, enjoying the rhythm and the wild singer's voice. When the song ended, she was about to leave the party with yours truly when I made a stupid remark that this was really a white band playing the blues. I got dropped like a hot potato and had to find my consolation listening to another gem from the album: "How You've Changed".

This is white blues at its best from 1965, seen from the perspective of Newcastle, England. Try these two songs with any European, they will go for it, whatever their sex orientation. And in the end, this is the best blues of 1965, seen from any point.

Today you can make an album with any song compilation. These two great songs will make your list for the ultimate swinging machine.

The Stones are relatively slow learners. It took them 10 years from their beginning in 1962 to release the ultimate rhythm'n'blues album of all times - "Exile on Main Stret". It took them six years, from the Summer of Love in 1967, to release their own version of a psychedelic masterpiece - "Goat's Head Soup".

Psychedelic is to paint with bright colors, to experience new, to look inside oneself. The "...Soup" has the most brilliant and vibrant sound of all Stones recordings. Was it because they recorded it in Jamaica? Whatever happened, they offer a vivid painting of solid rhythms of the usual (best) Stones variety with the scenery worth a Kinkade intensity. The songs are a diversity of amazing subjects from a starlet rock chant ("Star, Star") to a simple train song ("Silver Train"), to the most moving and sad love song ever written ("Angie"), not to mention the poetry of "100 Years Ago" and the guitar/words cliffhangers of "Winter". "Can You Hear the Music" is an effortless illustration of the beauty of ... music, while
"... Mr.D" gives a lighthearted insight into a devilish Faustus soul.

Mick Taylor shines here. Maybe the reaction to this album made him leave the band, as it was not a great commercial success? The Glimmer Twins took over the direction for the next release ("It's Only Rock'n'Roll"), which is nowhere nearly as good and then he was gone. One would wish more of this wonderful collaboration.

Is it the Stones best album? Who knows, this is one of the best.

Norman Davies has a great knack for fantastic subjects. What can be better than a microhistory of Central Europe on an example of a city that was Czech, Polish, Czech, Austrian, German and now is Polish! Also Wroclaw/Breslau happens to be my home town and it was a great place to live in the 70's with just about everybody an immigrant, an America in miniature under communist rule.

Norman Davies also has a great knack for writing his books assuming that you already know a lot of history. Sometimes I do not and he leaves me there high and dry grasping for facts.

This book gives you a continuity in European history where everything changes and still stays the same.