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This cover was apparently offensive to someone, somewhere and withdrawn. The hell? |
Sometimes, you hit on a perspective-shifting idea completely
by accident. Rhea and I were driving
home from somewhere or other, engaged in part 4,234 of our never-ending debate
over the parts of our respective music obsessions that we don’t agree on. Roughly defined, that would be the hair metal
that she loves versus the old-school punk and indie that occupies that same
space in my life. I’m not even sure now
how we got to this, but at some point I uttered the following and then opened
my eyes real wide-like, following its wisdom ever since: “Yeah, but you can’t
blame Skid Row for not being The Replacements or vice-versa.” Ever since coming up with that one, I’ve been
a lot less of a snob about things. Does
that mean that I suddenly love Skid Row?
Not at all; it didn’t speak to me then, and that hasn’t changed in the
time since we were all teenagers. What it
does mean is that I’ve learned to enjoy some things I would have previously
found immediately dismissible for what they are, rather than automatically
shunning them for what they aren’t.
That’s where Nine
Lives comes into this little slice of autobiography: complaints that it
doesn’t sound like Rocks or Toys in the Attic are absurd because it
was never meant to be that sort of an album.
Its competition, the barometer against which it should rightly be
judged, is the band’s work from Permanent
Vacation onward. Of that subset of
Aerosmith albums, it’s easily the second-best; it’s no match for Pump’s concision, but Nine Lives is surprisingly spiky and
live-wired for an album mean to follow up Get
a Grip’s ballad-a-thon. Which is
hardly to say that Nine Lives isn’t
ballad-heavy; it’s got just as many of ‘em as you’d expect. It’s just that they’re better written this
time around; they’re fun and sprightly, rather than labored and sludgy, which
is a massive improvement.
In fact, I’m not going to go song-by-song at all this time
around; apart from the frankly ridiculous “A Taste of India” and the air-played-out
“Pink”, I actively enjoy all of these songs to some extent. Nine
Lives is no huge masterpiece, but then again not everything needs to
be. It’s a big, loud, old-school
hard-rock good-time. It’s something to
blast in the car on a hot summer day when you feel like looking for more
trouble than you oughta be looking for at your age, and why not? You’re (probably) still younger than the guys
who made it, and if your “trouble” ends up being something on the order of
ordering a beer or three with your friends at, say, Applebee’s while “Pink”
blares from the piped-in background music, well, so be it: fun is where you
find it, musically or otherwise. If the
worst thing that can be said of an album is that it’s fun, then one of the best
things that can be said of it is that it does its job well.
Ladies and gentlemen, troublemakers of all ages, I give you Nine Lives…and encourage you, with every
ounce of sincerity in my soul, to have fun with it.
[Meta-note: Yeah, I
know, the blog background: where's the LP label? I’m assuming that
the vinyl on this one is fairly rare, given that (a) Rhea doesn’t even own it,
and (b) I can’t find an image on the web to steal, so the CD label it is, at least for this week.]
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