"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.

"Let The Music Do The Talking," "My Fist Your Face" & "Shame On You"

The first track, and lead single, from Aerosmith's first reunited album for Geffen was actually a cover of the title track to the first Joe Perry Project album. Steven Tyler reportedly liked it so much he felt inspired to go and write a whole new set of lyrics to make it their own (tellingly, the song is now performed at Joe Perry Project gigs with the original lyrics.) It's a pretty striking song, and gets the album off to a striking start. Longtime fans could be easily won over by an album full of songs of this calibur. From that very opening tease, through the riff, and finally the lyrics and especially the chorus, it's got a type of chemistry the band hadn't had since Draw the Line - and it equals almost everything on that album (not for nothing though, it incorporates the title track's riff.)



Likewise, "My Fist Your Face," while not much of an artistic triumph, shows the band is game. It has a kind of basic appeal, a good groove and a decent hook. It's still a fair bit removed from the glory years, but it exemplifies the backbone and rock-solidness of Mirrors, which even the worst, most forgettable tracks have. And in fact, this song has a dirty weird boogie that the next album lacked. This song itself represents one of the best obscure Aerosmith tracks: good, basic functional rock. The fundamentals in play.



Y'know, I said I'd talk about every Aerosmith song, and I've kept to that, but this is one I just have so little to say about. It's not bad... a pretty funky riff, a sort of good clean cut that the band lacked on Ruts and Hard Place... yet it lacks. It doesn't do anything, it's just there as filler, albeit filler with a decent riff.

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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