The Aerosmith song Steven Tyler called rock at its finest over the years

The Aerosmith song Steven Tyler called rock at its finest

over the years, there was never a time when the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ felt ashamed of wearing their rock and roll credentials like some badge of honour. While those credentials had taken a few dents over the course of their career, Steven Tyler still thought that one modern Aerosmith track had everything that people come to rock and roll to hear.

 

Granted, it’s not like Tyler doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Looking through some of the biggest albums of their career, he has practically nailed down the band’s sound to a science, whether that’s working with different bluesy licks left over from The Rolling Stones or putting together the finest power ballads that the world had ever heard on tunes like ‘Dream On’ or ‘You See Me Crying’.

 

By the time they reached the 2000s, though, most people would have sworn that they had forgotten what the genre meant. Just Push Play may have done decent numbers, but instead of sounding like a return to their roots, Tyler seemed to be more concerned with throwing in as many callbacks to ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’ as he could with a thin veil of Aerosmith on top of it.

 

Although Honkin’ on Bobo did at least put them on firmer ground with the public, it was hard to look at any of the songs as genuine when they were covers. So, if they were going to make any new record, it was going to need to do more than have a couple of decent licks on it to win over fans.

 

But did Music from Another Dimension do that? Well, yes and no. While the album is bloated to all hell, tunes like ‘Lover Alot’ and ‘Legendary Child’ give off faint whiffs of the magic they had in their prime when making ‘Walk This Way’. Even the ballad ‘What Could Have Been Love’ turned out alright, but Tyler felt that Perry’s songs like ‘Oh Yeah’ took everything they were known for and turned it up even more.

 

Compared to the last records of pop fare, Tyler felt that the tune was what fans needed to hear, saying, “If you want to hear rock and roll at its finest, just listen to Joe’s song ‘Oh Yeah’ on the new album. I haven’t heard anybody do anything like that in a while. Put that up against anything on Rocks or Toys in the Attic. I think it stands up.”

 

And it’s not like he’s wrong. When Perry is left to his own devices, he can still sound pretty damn good, especially when working off of Tyler’s adult lyrics and a handful of bluesy leads thrown in for good measure. It’s nowhere near the level of ‘Sweet Emotion’ or anything, but for a band that seemed to sell out long ago, the fact that they could still release something of this quality was at least

commendable.