From the imagination deficient Twilight Zone steal opening you might want to be selling your interdimensional travel machine on ebay to the highest bidder. This decade Aerosomith have released a blues cover album and a bunch of originals which didn't nothing to reclaim their position at the center or even the fringes of the blues metal world they ruled some 30 years ago.
But while nobody would be silly enough to call their new album, Music From Another Dimension remotely close to good, it isn't the worst album I've heard this year. Wait, let me qualify that. "What Could Have Been Love: and "Can't Stop Loving You" (with the consistently disappointing Carrie Underwood) are both the sort of moldy big hair ballads all right rhinking people hide under the bed to escape, but for the most part Dimension is exactly what you might hope it was. One blues rock after another, crappy lyrics, but Steve Tyler has a whisp of self-awareness in his singing, and the band is tight enough, really not so terribly self-indulgent. Joe Perry is a good guitarist. He knows blues and he knows pop.
The very first song "Luv XXX" is a keeper, "Jesus Wept" is a keeper, "Lover Alot" has a really good drum roll by one Joey Kramer who has always been a great drummer and the one thing I am unequivocably looking forward to hearing live at MSG later this year.
The album breaks down into three parts, rockers, blues rockers, ballads. The rockers aren't great but they aren't bad, and the ballads are just plain brutal. Steve Tyler has always sucked at ballads but we are saps for guys with long wigs too much feeling so he can't help but roll em out. On Dimension it truly sinks the damn thing… The first six songs set you up for what you think is gonna be a fun ride, but 5 of the last 10 songs are deadly and not all the rockers work either.
I have always figured Aerosmith as being the Rolling Stones without the Aero and without the Stones. Their songs are just not all that great. So with a expectation so low it is barely existent, and considering Tyler a joke at best, I went to this album already closed off. And, no, it isn't any good, but it isn't all bad.
Grade: C