Def Leppard began touring with bands like AC/DC and Sammy Hagar when the oldest member of the band, lead vocalist Joe Elliott, was 19 years old. Now, 37 years later, the group released its 12th album, the eponymous “Def Leppard.”
For the first half of the new album, “Def Leppard” featured Def Leppard songs that sounded exactly like Def Leppard, as most of its fans were hoping. There are several songs — such as “Let’s Go,” “Dangerous” and “All Time High” — where Elliott stretched his trademark British vocals, Phil Collen strummed radiating chords on the electric guitar, and the rest of the band nailed sharp percussion that makes listeners with the longest of hair bang their heads.
The first track, “Let’s Go,” made me yell “Def Leppard is back!” as it had similarities with other Def Leppard hits “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “Photograph.”
However, with seven years of incessantly changing music between “Def Leppard” and the band’s last album “Songs from the Sparkle Lounge,” some of the songs were bound to feature changes in style.
They did, with some success, but mostly with mediocrity. The band’s first attempt to modernize its style came on the seventh track, “Energized.” I never thought I’d hear electronic snare drums in a Def Leppard song, but it happened in this track. Combine the drums with the group’s trademark collective background singing, and it just works.
The same cannot be said for the rest of the album, though, as Def Leppard attempted modern alternative rock techniques in songs like “Forever Young,” which made the band sound forever old.
The in-studio sound in “Man Enough” — on top of the lyrics “Are you man enough to be my girl?” — made me cautiously skip to the next track in hopes that it would be the only blemish on the album.
It wasn’t.
The last song of the album, “Blind Faith,” took the cake. The track started with slow guitar and Elliott vocals, then there were flutes and then a hard rockout with falsettos near the end. The choppy rhythm was five-and-a-half minutes of splatter painting in musical form, nothing like the Def Leppard of the 1980s.
Aside from the handful of tracks that didn’t portray the original style of the group, the album featured lyrical poetry, love songs that show the band’s soft side and examples of every age of music the band has played through.
For example, “Last Dance” is the quintessential ‘80s rock love song, with lyrics like “Do you remember when we used to sing / A shooting star across the sky / A fire that would never die.” On top of the lyrics, the band plays a ‘90s style acoustic with 2000s style studio editing, the result of which is the wrapping of all three decades into one three-minute romantic lullaby.
“Last Dance” is the song on every musical album that sits near the end of the list, buried in the songs no one likes, and fails to get the number of plays that it would get closer to the top.
Including “We Belong,” the typical smooth-rhythm love song that appears on every Def Leppard album, the band doesn’t venture too far away from its original style — at least far enough to drive away its fans.
Unlike most aging rock bands, Def Leppard showed — for half the album — that its style can thrive in a modern world where auto-tune, bubble-gum pop and monotony rule the radiowaves.
“Just like the movies when the hero never dies / I am immortal when you look into my eyes.”
