Album Review, Aerosmith, "Get A Grip"

Three songs in this album don't look too promising. Good by most bands' standards, average by Aerosmith's, despite their distinctive bubbling groove and the biting satire of Eat The Rich. Get A Grip, lads!

The situation is remedied by Living On The Edge, seen by some as a strange single choice, but it's a well conceived, serious song, given a subtle slant by unorthodox vocals and some searing, dynamic guitar work by messers Tyler and Perry. It wouldn't be the 'Smiths' if a fair proportion of their songs weren't about sex, and, true to form, the likes of the sinewy Flesh, Shut Up Dance, and especially the Eastern tinged Gotta Love It, which comes on like the Beatles with a hard on, do wet the appetite. There are a few ballads here such as Crazy, co-written with Desmond Child, and a bit of a syrupy, cliched 50s thing with rock trimmings. But it's the sweeping soul-wringing climax of Amazing that gets the tear ducts flowing. Get A Grip, though lacking the sparkle and character of Pump, keeps their star burning brightly.

GRADE B+

Mark Liddell
Riff Raff
June, 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!