Rocks - Aerosmith
For the second week in succession, it’s a rock album – but in this case, it’s not a band past their best years, looking for a change in direction, it’s Aerosmith in the 70s in their full-on rock glory.
To my ears, there’s not a lot of variation from one song to another. There’s a lot of guitar work to admire from twin guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, Steven Tyler screams his way through a lot of songs – it doesn’t bother me, but on a song like “Rats in the Cellar”, he sounds more like David Lee Roth and better for it. There are some excellent codas on show: loads of guitar and other instruments such as harmonica doing interesting stuff on “Back in the Saddle” and “Rats in the Cellar”.
I have to confess that on the challenge
@OB1 set for me to hear the banjo, I failed miserably. Twice I listened to the album without hearing it, then I checked the credits and found that it was on “Last Child” – I listened to the song twice more, once on headphones and still didn’t hear it.
Whilst there’s not much variety from track-to-track, this means that there’s a consistency to the sound, and as a few people have already mentioned, the production is top-notch. This could easily pass for an album recorded in the 80s or 90s. A lot of the fun in listening to this album is the way the rhythm guitar lays down such great, choppy, chunky riffs and the lead guitar buzzes all over it like an elusive fly. Tyler’s “screaming” didn’t bother me – its rock music and you expect a bit of histrionics from the vocalist.
As several people have mentioned it, I thought I’d give the previous album,
Toys in the Attic, a listen. It seems that the change in sound between these two albums was significant, and depending on your tastes, you could see it as a great leap forward, or the end of an era (or maybe both).
Toys in the Attic has a more varied sound, almost as if the band are putting on a showcase for various styles from hard rock to cabaret-style show tunes, whereas
Rocks pares down the sound to the razor-sharp guitars and Tyler goes wild behind the mic. On listening, I hadn’t noticed the bass and drums higher in the mix that Foggy mentioned, bit I did make a note at the time that
Toys had a fuller sound – maybe that’s the same thing without realising it? For the record, I enjoyed both albums equally.
I haven’t listened to enough Aerosmith to know how long this more focussed and pared-down approach lasted after
Rocks, but I note that on my favourite song of theirs released in 1987, “Dude Looks Like A Lady”, they were throwing in a horn section.
For me,
Rocks is an enjoyable album to listen to with plenty of guitar to admire, but after it’s finished (for the third time) there isn’t a memorable song or two that I’d be hankering to play again. But I do like it better than last week’s offering from The Rolling Stones – any experimentation and left-turns are thrown out the window in favour of a consistent and cohesive sound that possibly set the template, in terms of tone and production, for a lot of bands like Van Halen that were to spring up in the next few years.
7/10.
