Toys in the Attic (1975)
1.Toys in the Attic
2.Uncle Salty
3.Adam's Apple
4.Walk This Way
5.Big Ten Inch Record
6.Sweet Emotion
7.No More No More
8.Round and Round
9.You See Me Crying
The first true classic of the band's illustrious career. Their third release perfects everything that this band set out to do on prior records where they may have fallen a bit short. While they would definitely be a more popular band in the eighties and nineties, they were at the peak of "phase one" of their career around the time of this release, and it was still a couple of years before the abuse of drugs would temporarily take their toll.
The amazing thing about this record is how diverse it is without compromising the band's reputation. There's plenty of experimenting, such as the cover of the great blues classic Big Ten Inch Record. It's about as bluesy as you can get, with a hint of ballroom sway and just enough sleaze to keep the song true to the band's reputation - "suck on my big ten inch.........record....". There's the classic Walk This Way with the obligatory Joe Perry riff that invokes a little bit of danceable rhythms to it that you can't really call a full blown heavy metal song. There are even a couple of songs that actually sound years ahead of their time such as the heavily layered Round and Round and the classic Sweet Emotion that acutally did become a hit song when the band released their boxset 15 years later in 1990. They crank out a pretty decent ballad at the end of the album with You See Me Crying that, fortunately, doesn't have any of the sap that would permeate the band years later.
Ironically,the only song that's a bit of a dissappointment is the opening title track. It's fast, it's heavy, it screams, but it falls short on hooks and isn't very memorable. They quickly recover with the seedy Uncle Salty, about a dirty old perv (I think) and then a nice "biblical" track Adam's Apple. They would make more memorable records than this, but this is definitely one of the best things they ever did.