Couple of newer releases, and a few from earlier in the year:
Aerosmith - Music From Another Dimension! Aerosmith is one of the truly great American hard rock bands. Whatever else they've done over their extensive history, the early trifecta of
Get Your Wings / Toys in the Attic / Rocks took the Stones' energy and angst and brought it home in spades. Of course, since that time, their track record has varied some. Most notably, since their resurgence in the late '80s with
Permanent Vacation and
Pump, the band has shamelessly incorporated a level of song-doctoring and outside songwriting that would put a slew of hacky pop bands to shame. The saving grace is that they still have Joe Perry, and really the entire band is effective at putting their own stamp on pretty much anything (as anyone who's ever heard the old
Live Bootleg version of James Brown's
Mother Popcorn can attest).
The problem here is twofold: one is that rock has been pretty much pushed out of the mainstream of what passes for pop culture these days, making any album an uphill struggle even for well-established acts; and two, while Steven Tyler may have parlayed his
American Idol stint into a prime pop presence, with that comes the burden of maintaining that profile for that particular audience, most of whom probably had to consult Wikipedia to figure out who Tyler was in the first place.
It's not that
Dimension! is terrible; it does serve as a document of the band's evolution, and there are plenty of catchy tunes in a variety of styles. But aside from Perry's reliably raunchy lead work, it's mostly polished, pretty, and predictable. There are some nice old-school moments in
Out Go the Lights,
Freedom Fighter, and
Street Jesus,. And hell, it's
Aerosmith. But by the time you get to the obligatory duet with, um, Carrie Underwood (she's 29, Tyler is 64, just sayin'), you almost expect a cameo from J-Lo.
Like their heroes the Stones, Aerosmith have by and large joined up with the establishment they avoided in their misspent youth. That's okay; probably the only person on the planet in their mid-sixties who can convincingly flip off The Man without looking like a schmuck is Lemmy. But one is reminded of Wayne Campbell's poetic admonition to Garth Elgar: "Led Zeppelin didn't write songs that everyone liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."
Black Country Communion - Afterglow For those not familiar, Black Country Communion (BCC) are one o' them dreaded "supergroups", the term generally associated with those plodding entities from the '70s, that seemed to begin with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and end with, well, Asia, which boasted Palmer as a member.
But BCC, comprised of Deep Purple Mark 3 bassist/singer Glenn Hughes, hard-blues shredder Joe Bonamassa, keyboard virtuoso Derek Sherinian, and drum legacy Jason Bonham, won't be mistaken for ELP or Asia anytime soon. Sixties and Seventies style "retro rock" is bouncing back big, mostly with bands like the Black Keys, but also with lesser-known bands such as Rival Sons and The Answer, both of whom feature classic Robert Plant/Stevie Marriott-type blues belters.
BCC are very much in that mold, pushing their Purple/Zeppelin roots for all they're worth, cranking out riffs by the truckload. Hughes, at age 61, sings balls-out like someone half his age, as if still doing tracks for
Burn. Sherinian is in full Jon Lord mode, in the best sense of the word -- he combines the late great Lord's impeccable Hammond B3 chops with a sense of restraint, as much or more of an accompanist than a pure soloist. Bonham lives up to the family name and does his old man proud.
Bonamassa may have the toughest line to tread here, to not come off sounding too much like either Jimmy Page or Ritchie Blackmore, and in this he succeeds admirably, by finding the English guitar icon that fits both sensibilities perfectly -- Jeff Beck. The mercurial Beck was always far and away the most imaginative and technically accomplished of any of the British guitarists of that era, and even his more recent work sounds fresh and current. Bonamassa shows that kind of fire and spirit in his playing, with some sweet cascading runs in the romping
Confessor, some great Beck-type whammy-bar fluttering in the title track, and ripping blues bursts throughout. The Zeppelin-esque stomp
Crawl is nice closer to a solid, tight, old-school effort.
22 - Flux/The Pool Sessions This one came out during the summer, and it's too bad it didn't get more attention. The easy genre description would be something along the lines of "pop-mathcore", but those sorts of hybrid generalizations tend to shortchange the parts they attempt to cobble together. 22, hailing from Norway, have recognizable elements, but combine them well in their own way. Certainly the busy mathcore/djent components are there throughout, especially on tracks such as
Gotodo and
Disconnected from the Grid, and there's even some (almost) metallic atonal rhythmic chugging kicking off
Oxygen.
But what separates these guys from the trap of easy categorization is how melodic and catchy the choruses are, no matter how busy the verses tend to be. It's as if Animals as Leaders or Scale the Summit borrowed Matthew Bellamy for vocal work, with Muse's more Queen-style melodies anchoring the songs, with a little Mars Volta thrown in for good measure. Indeed, songs such as
Kneel Estate and
Susurrus sound straight out of the Muse hymnal, more
Absolution or
Black Holes and Revelations than their last two more orchestrated efforts.
This is one of the coolest things I've heard all year -- weird, catchy, dense, virtuosic, interesting, unabashedly both poppy and nerdy. One of those albums that gets better with each listen.