Nine Lives by Aerosmith

It's hard to complain about something free, but somebody put Nine Lives on the swap table at work in the case for 40 Seasons: the Best of Skid Row. So, when I popped it into my car's player, I thought I was going to recapture my "Youth Gone Wild." Instead I got (to quote lyrics from the title track) a "stay of execution."

The last Aerosmith album I paid real money for was Get a Grip because, after "Cryin'" was such a megahit, it seems like every subsequent single has been trying to duplicate the formula. Which means you can identify an intended single in the first five seconds ("Falling in Love [Is Hard on the Knees]" and "Hole in My Soul," for example). This is fortunate because it means you can quickly skip garbage like "Full Circle" ("If I could change the world like a fairy tale, I would drink the love from your Holy Grail" — where's my toothbrush?) and get to the only good things about Nine Lives: the deep tracks hidden in the middle.

It seems that their blatant attempts to give the public what it wants have not hindered their creativity elsewhere. "Nine Lives" opens with kick-ass hard rock nicely reminiscent of Pump (still my favorite Aerosmith album).

Later, the band offers a "Taste of India" with sitar and sweeping strings grounded by the thunderous rhythm section of Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer. "Something's Gotta Give" is a harmonica-centric track that would not have been out of place on Toys in the Attic.

"Ain't That a Bitch" starts out like slow jazz and turns into a groovy power ballad from the "What It Takes" songbook that nonetheless gets a little "Hey Jude"-y with its overstay-its-welcome ending. And "The Farm" is a fun little trifle with terrific orchestral support that would make a great party song (even if the Wizard of Oz clips are more than a little strange).

And ... that's it. The rest of the album is filled out with dreck. "Crash" is a mish-mash of pop-punk and metal that is just confusing. "Kiss Your Past Goodbye" is a weak ballad obviously geared toward tramps and the guys who screw them. "Pink" is an execrable waste of a good groove, spoiled mainly by the fact that the lyrics don't have the guts to be as suggestive as they really want to be. ("Pink is like red but not quite"? They need to take some lessons from AC/DC.)

Worst of all, "Attitude Adjustment" sounds like something that would have even been filler on some mid-'80s hair-metal band like Autograph. And "Fallen Angels" is a failed attempt at meaningful lyrics that falls flat when the song doesn't even know what it means ("Where do fallen angels go? I just don't know.... They keep fallin'") and yet manages to go on for eight minutes before simply fading out.

CDs these days have way too many tracks because people feel like they need to fill out the 80-minute running time to give listeners their money's worth. But Nine Lives has a solid 20 minutes of good music, which is more than a lot of CDs I paid full price for back in the '90s. And isn't that what the programmable feature on your CD player's for, anyhow?

Black Ice by AC/DC

There are few things in this crazy world that you can really depend on, but the sound of an AC/DC song is one of them. Since their beginnings in the early 1970s, their sound has changed very little — even through a change of frontmen that, in retrospect, was more drastic than it seemed at the time — except that more modern producers have removed the tinny sound of their early records and replaced it with a deeper one that truly does their music justice.

Now, I'm not saying that AC/DC are the best band ever, but they're certainly one of the most consistent, and Black Ice is just one more example of this. Of the fifteen songs on this, their first studio album since 2000's Stiff Upper Lip (and the first to feature lyrics by vocalist Brian Johnson since 1988's Blow Up Your Video), only a couple are not up to the level of their brethren. The rest of the album is a solid lineup of concert anthems, the kind of rock n roll at which the boys from Australia have always excelled.

Johnson's comment that "we found out what we were good at, and that was rock n roll" may have been what inspired the group this time around, given that there are three songs on Black Ice with "Rock n Roll" in the title (and one called "Rocking All the Way"), including the first single, "Rock n Roll Train," whose chorus actually says "Runaway Train." (But God forbid someone confuse them with Soul Asylum!)

The lyrics have never been the high point on any AC/DC album (except, as stated above, when it comes to their consistency). This time, if anything, they are a bit tamer than usual, with what seems to be much less innuendo (possibly something to do with the album being primarily available through Wal-Mart in the U.S.). But arena-rock songs aren't about intelligent words, anyway, to wit this verse from "Rock n Roll Train":

One hot Southern belle
Son of a devil
A schoolboy spelling bee
A schoolgirl with a fantasy

Those words don't mean anything, but when Johnson wails them, well, you just want to wail right along with him. Luckily, the musicianship on Black Ice is strong enough to carry the album. Though it's the heavy-metal/hard-rock listenership that most fully embraces them, AC/DC has always been, at its heart, a blues-rock band, and several songs bring this right to the front. Witness the riff on "Decibel" that sounds lifted right from Beale Street, with Johnson surprisingly deft at using his lower register vocals in accompaniment.

In fact, most of the second half of Black Ice is saturated in blues rock, and it's so far my favorite portion. Don't get me wrong: I love a good fist-pumping riot as much as the next guy, but there's just something about that white-boy blues that brings it on home for me. There's not enough "Stormy May Day" to go around in my opinion — Angus uses a slide(!) and reminds me of Led Zeppelin's "In My Time of Dying." (Incidentally, "Skies on Fire" reminds me of another Jimmy Page track from his best solo album, Outrider.)

But whatever you think of the band's style, if you're a fan, you'll be enthralled by Black Ice. Even my three-year-old son is already a fan of "the train song" and "Big Jack" (which he thinks is actually about Big Jet from Little Einsteins, and I don't correct him because I think it's cute), so there's another potential fan on the way up. Luckily, the odds are that, by the time he's old enough to pay money for his own albums (in whatever form they're available by then), AC/DC will still be playing the same kind of hard rock grounded by Phil Rudd's journeyman 4/4 beat, Chris Williams's unwavering bass, and Malcolm Young's invisible rhythm — and I'm really glad they are.