Rocks

They'd soon crash, and hard, thanks to their own excesses. But Rocks captures Aerosmith at a crazily driven peak of creativity; anyone who heard it and continued to dismiss them as mere Stones clones was just being willful. This is blues rock cranked up to '70s stadium level, the sound of the Trans Am, or maybe the Porsches several of these guys (surprisingly) remember driving. The psychic battering they would succumb to on the next year's Draw the Line is foreshadowed in Joe Perry's "Combination," but he and Steven Tyler also celebrate the rock-star mythos on "Lick and a Promise." The party-fueled tension, the tension-fueled party. --Rickey Wright