Get Your Wings (1974)
1.Same Old Song and Dance
2.Lord of the Thighs
3.Spaced On
4.Woman of the World
5.S.O.S. (Too Bad)
6.The Train Kept A Rollin'
7.Seasons of Wither
8.Pandora's Box
Like a lot of veteran bands, it took Aerosmith a little bit of time before they refined the sound that could be easily branded as their own style. If their first release sounded as though they were in the process of discovering how they wanted to sound, they easily had that perfected by this release. This album sounds, well, like most of their classic seventies material. They don't deviate that much from what they started out as, they just sound a little tighter, a little sleazier, and a lot more confident.
The best known track, the opener Same Old Song And Dance is a great representation of everything else that is featured here. Great guitar riff, a perfected Steven Tyler yowl, and lyrics about a drug deal gone bad are all trademarks that followers of this band love. The second track is almost as good, the cheeky titled Lord of the Thighs, which doesn't lose anything either. The song has a catchy, almost danceable rhythm section, yet never compromises it's gritty feel.
Sometimes they do come up short, the track Spaced for example, seems to try to hard to convey a feeling of being "spaced" out on artificial stimulants while playing eerie "spacey" music. It falls a little thin. Likewise The Train Kept A Rollin' seems to not go anywhere in particular, then pauses in the middle to a background din of a concert audience (dubbed to sound like a live recording) before the drums start rat-a-tatt-ing (in a "fast train" motion) before the band picks up and plays faster. Not better, but just faster. It's a little too Spinal Tappish.
They finish off in high style, with the dreamy Seasons of Wither, that incorporates a slower, yet still heavy, sound that - again is a precurser to what we would hear a lot in the years to come. They close with a great tune that brings us full circle with another (sadly) forgotten gem, Pandora's Box. The whole album has more memorable moments than forgettable ones. You could argue that a lot of it sounds the same, but as long as the music is good, why should anyone care?