10 Perfect Albums That Have Awful Production

It practically took a small miracle to bring every Aerosmith member back into the fold in the early '80s. Even though the Bad Boys from Boston hadn't quite cleaned up their act just yet, the magic chemistry between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry was ready to tear some heads off again, and Done With Mirrors was going to be what launched them back into the limelight. Then again, the rock scene was looking a lot different than how it was when they came off of Draw the Line.

Coming around the same time that the Sunset Strip was still tearing up the charts, Done With Mirrors tends to sound fairly behind the times by comparison, sounding like the logical record that should have come after Draw the Line rather than breaking any new ground. Though the years in the gutter led to some of their more hard edged songs like Let the Music Do the Talking, Aerosmith seemed to be losing their way amid the rest of the hard rock that came before, with acts like Van Halen doing a more energetic version of what this album was hoping to do around the same time.

While Rick Rubin may have redeemed the band just a few years later by reinterpolating Walk This Way into a Run DMC song, it was also a bit of a mixed bag, leading to Aerosmith straying away from their bluesy roots to blend in with the rest of the rock scene. Something like Permanent Vacation may have gone over well in its time, but we can only imagine the metal tinged version of Aerosmith that we could have gotten if this album was the one that put them back on top.