"She's on Fire" "The Hop" & "Darkness"

Although Done with Mirrors sags a bit in the middle (I have love for "The Reason a Dog" but did not feel too bad I couldn't find videos for other songs) it ends with a trio of tracks that gets the album set right. They represent a lot of great things Aerosmith could do with an album cut. "She's on Fire" has an almost mystic slide groove. What's more it sounds utterly fresh for the first time in about 8 years for the band.



Likewise, (mind the live recording) "The Hop" isn't much more than a somewhat poppy, somewhat hooky rock song, maybe a bit cleaner than their 70's work but still energetic and with a hell of an upside.



"Darkness" is probably my favourite track on Done with Mirrors. It's a real burst of inspiration for this otherwise competent-but-by-numbers album. It rests of Steven Tyler's still capable vocals and a darkenesd jazz-blues atmosphere. The last three tracks on this album are not only high quality but quite distinct. They showed a promising focus and direction, but promise wasn't going to get this band back to the top.

Compared to future efforts, this one was a bit of a half-hearted attempt at a comeback. In a way, like its predecessors, that makes the music itself tough to talk about, and while there are successes, there are too many songs that fall flat. While Rock in a Hard Place is not necessarily as bad as it's supposed to be, this one never quite gets good enough to become a hidden gem.

They had skill. They had it together. They could do something. They just needed to give people a reason to care.