At some point in the 1990s, amidst the rising popularity of the compact disc, an older cousin gave me his old cassettes of Aerosmith\u2019s Get a Grip<\/i> and Pump<\/i>. By the time I entered junior high school in 1997, Aerosmith had become one of my favorite bands, in spite of the unending mockery I got from my parents. \u201cAerosmith? Are those guys still alive?\u201d and \u201cYou\u2019re 13 years old! Shouldn\u2019t you be listening to newer music?\u201d were among some of the frequent, heckling phrases I endured at that tender age. <\/p>\n
Needless to say, when Nine Lives<\/i> hit the shelves I was excited: a new album from Aerosmith! This\u2019ll prove \u2019em wrong and show that these guys are still rockin\u2019 just as hard as the likes of Bush, Fastball and Matchbox 20! <\/p>\n
Well, as it turned out, I was only partially correct. The disc wasn\u2019t a riff-laden hard rock magnum opus like Bush\u2019s Sixteen Stone<\/i> (please note the sarcasm\u2026). But listening to it today, I have to say that the handful of good songs on the album have stood the test of time better than a lot of the other mainstream hits to come out of the late 90s. <\/p>\n
I must admit though, even at the age of 13, I couldn\u2019t help but scratch my head at the sound of this album when I first popped it into the cassette player. It was so slickly produced and layered with orchestral overdubs, it sounded almost like a different band than the one that had recorded Pump<\/i>, let alone Toys In The Attic<\/i>. It was also littered with ballads, and I can remember battling with my tape deck as I endeavored to jump to the hard rock numbers and skip drawn-out ballads like \u201cHole In My Soul.\u201d <\/p>\n
Listening to it today, I have mixed feelings. Aerosmith still had the knack for writing guitar-fueled hard rock songs in the vein of their earlier material. \u201cCrash\u201d is a great little song that recalls the furious pace of \u201cRats In The Cellar.\u201d Likewise, \u201cAttitude Adjustment\u201d and the title track both have the same rockin\u2019 vibe to them. It was cleaned-up and lacked the grit of the 70s, but the formula was still largely the same as the good old days. <\/p>\n
Of all the songs on here, \u201cFalling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)\u201d is the one I remember most vividly, right down to the hokey music video of Steven Tyler being shipped through a mental ward or hospital. The song still holds up well ten years after its release. The horns and infectious chorus put it in the same league as their hits from the Permanent Vacation<\/i>-era for me. \u201cTaste Of India\u201d was also one of my favorites when I first bought this album, though the whole Eastern motif is pretty hokey-sounding nowadays. Still, it\u2019s a decent track, with Sadly, for every good track, there\u2019s a cringe-inducing ballad or formulaic pop song. \u201cHole In My Soul\u201d is a wretched affair, a sort of precursor to \u201cI Don\u2019t Want To Miss A Thing\u201d in terms of cheese and melodrama. \u201c Aerosmith still had what it took to write good rock songs and catchy radio hits at this point, and that commands some respect in itself. But the band\u2019s dependence on outside writers and their focus on power-ballads had reached a turning point, and today Nine Lives<\/i> can only be described as a hollow listening experience. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":24423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5636],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-40674","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-aerosmith","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40674"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}