Nine Lives Essex Junction VT

Nine Lives

Aerosmith

Columbia Records, 1997

REVIEW BY: Ben McVicker

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 12/27/2007

At some point in the 1990s, amidst the rising popularity of the compact disc, an older cousin gave me his old cassettes of Aerosmith’s Get a Grip and Pump. By the time I entered junior high school in 1997, Aerosmith had become one of my favorite bands, in spite of the unending mockery I got from my parents. “Aerosmith? Are those guys still alive?” and “You’re 13 years old! Shouldn’t you be listening to newer music?” were among some of the frequent, heckling phrases I endured at that tender age.

Needless to say, when Nine Lives hit the shelves I was excited: a new album from Aerosmith! This’ll prove ’em wrong and show that these guys are still rockin’ just as hard as the likes of Bush, Fastball and Matchbox 20!

Well, as it turned out, I was only partially correct. The disc wasn’t a riff-laden hard rock magnum opus like Bush’s Sixteen Stone (please note the sarcasm…). But listening to it today, I have to say that the handful of good songs on the album have stood the test of time better than a lot of the other mainstream hits to come out of the late 90s.

I must admit though, even at the age of 13, I couldn’t help but scratch my head at the sound of this album when I first popped it into the cassette player. It was so slickly produced and layered with orchestral overdubs, it sounded almost like a different band than the one that had recorded Pump, let alone Toys In The Attic. It was also littered with ballads, and I can remember battling with my tape deck as I endeavored to jump to the hard rock numbers and skip drawn-out ballads like “Hole In My Soul.”