Joe Perry’s back! Does it matter?
Aerosmith – Done With Mirrors – 1985 (Buy It)
The band is “Done with mirrors”, they would have us believe. They like the amateur puns, these guys. In this case, we are to believe that they are done with using mirrors to cut their cocaine and that they are BACK!
Are they?
From the opening track, “Let the Music Do The Talking”, one might believe so. Sadly, that track is actually a holdover from The Joe Perry Project and it does succeed in kickstarting this record.
After that everything sounds so forced. Like the band is trying to show their relevance but its just not doing it for me. The licks are lazy. The lyrics are abysmal (My Fist your Face? The reason a Dog??? Hate women much, Stevie?) There’s no nuance here, there are really no songs, either, at least nothing you would ever want to hear again.
I am definitely in the minority here. A quick check of Wikipedia shows that Allmusic.com says that this is the better album compared to the next, starmaking one. Others give it a good review. And they all uniformly despise Rock in a Hard Place. Well, to each his own.
This is a terrible record. What I would like to do is get a bindle of coke, pour it out on the cover of the cd and cut lines all the while laughing demonically at the irony.
In one year Aerosmith would be elevated to the stratosphere by way of Run-DMC but right here, in 1985, if I was an Aerosmith fan, after listening to Done With Mirrors I would have been Done With Aerosmith. (See what I did there? Can I name your next record, Steve?)
I can’t wait to delete this thing.
Grade D –
A Side: Let the Music Do The Talking
BlindSide: Nothing
DownSide:8 other tracks.
