NEW AEROSMITH UP TO THE SAME OLD TRICKS

Aerosmith’s hard-rock credibility rating has been nil ever since the band got collectively beaten up by the Bee Gees in the “Sgt. Pepper” movie, but things have a way of coming around, and on Friday, the Sports Arena was fairly full of fans too young to have experienced that embarrassment. They got to see a comeback performance in many ways as potent as the ones their older brothers or uncles saw a decade ago. Guitarist Joe Perry was back in the saddle, and not only is singer Steve Tyler still skinny enough to fit into his old bathrobes, but he’s now hitting the kind of raspy falsetto notes that he was missing even during the band’s mid-’70s peak.

If Aerosmith has changed, it’s in a slightly more metallic bent to the new songs (all vastly inferior to the heavy-boogie oldies), and the disappearance of any sense of humor outside of the nasty and the witlessly self-parodic--unless outmoded dope jokes, tiresome phallic antics and chick-bashing anthems like “My Fist Your Face” are your idea of yucks. Perhaps another conk on the head from the brothers Gibb could knock these guys out of their amnesiac time warp.