Done With Mirrors (1985)

So after Rock in a Hard Place further cemented Aerosmith's distance from the charts and popular taste, they spent another couple of years in the woods, touring with Crespo and Dufay before Joe Perry and Brad Whitford rejoined the fold. (The story goes that Crespo was preparing to write new material and Dufay helped initiate contact between Perry and Tyler - they did not like each other.) But the first lost period of Aero history was not quite over yet.

There are a few moments in the band's discography that are cut and dried. Everyone with an interest know Toys and Rocks and Pump are great, and that Ruts and Hard Place are the dregs. While you've seen me argue against the validity of this dichotomy, I'm willing to recognize its validity. It's easy and not entirely inaccurate. But there are also those moments, as plentiful as the black-and-white ones, where the truth is a bit more gray. They tend to mark the midway points on Aerosmith's parabolic arcs... the first album and Draw the Line are two examples I've already discussed. There are more down the road, but Done With Mirrors has such a strange place in the Aero narrative that it almost doesn't exist. It was their first album for Geffen Records. It was supposed to be their comeback statement. It really wasn't.

Those that think of it at all have a lot of praise for it, but lacking era-defining hits means it's sunk into obscurity. My own thoughts are that it's a rehearsal for their real comeback, or even a farewell to their 70's selves. The material has more appeal than that on Hard Place, at the expense of being less distinguished. At times inspired but at times plain and overly clean-sounding, this just wasn't an album that was going to send this band from obscurity back to the top. It's a low risk, low reward album, a rarity in the Aero canon - if nothing else, Rock in a Hard Place and Night in the Ruts had risks. They needed a blockbuster, they wound up with an also-ran.

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