Def Leppard
Songs From The Sparkle Lounge

I have great sympathy for this honest, hardworking, friendly, and cohesive group from industrious Sheffield, in the heart of England. They continue to stay together and make music, the same lineup for a quarter of a century, while having long realized that the prosperous times of the eighties can no longer be recreated.

The producer back then, Mutt Lange (the man behind the console during the golden era of people like AC/DC, Foreigner, Bryan Adams... in short, a guru of melodic and accessible hard rock) taught them very well how to produce tough yet commercial rock records, and the quintet still performs with gusto: the sounds are powerful yet smooth, the solos are short, thoughtful, and striking, with no hesitation in adding the usual choruses and overdubs.

Of course, it's known that this type of rock was put out of fashion by the wave from Seattle in the early nineties, but so much time has passed... the same grunge has long since returned to the underground from which it came, so these and other phases of rock evolution can currently be viewed from the same perspective. And so, it's just a matter of taste... my personal tastes lead me to occasionally return to the current, remaining AOR, Class Metal, etc., with moderation since these are genres that I absorbed heavily at the time, leaving me almost intoxicated.

Everything is in its place in this album: relatively short, compact, and energetic songs, direct and accessible, of moderate success only because, in 2008, the year of the album's release, they had simply overstayed their welcome. The voice of the frontman Elliott was never one of those particularly memorable in the sector, but his face and attitude are honest and right; the two guitarists Collen and Campbell work perfectly as a team, they divide the parts, and it is difficult to distinguish them because they have a very similar style; the rhythm section formed by bassist Savage and drummer Allen plays with beautiful melodic creativity and forceful rhythmic attack, which is miraculous for Allen, who has been forced to play with only one arm for the past thirty years after the amputation suffered in a car accident.

The best episodes, I find, are first of all “Come Undone”, which offers the usual Led Zeppelin-like riff but then tempers it in the attractive, cheeky modulation of chords in the chorus, a house specialty along with the resounding choruses, the fruit of accurate and skillful layering of voices in the studio (and which the Leppard cannot remotely achieve live, unfortunately for them). Then “Hallucinate”, which the singer tackles somewhat in a Bryan Adams style, which are probably the consequences of the shared producer. Another good feature is “Nine Lives”, Leppardian to the core (the nineties with the clumsy attempt to recycle themselves with trendy sounds from Seattle are now far away and forgotten), with muted and claustrophobic guitars in the verses that open into full chords and various pads in the refrains. In “Only The Good Die Young”, a mellotron-like arrangement stands out à la “Strawberry Fields Forever”, before the rhythm unleashes and swallows it.

The album doesn’t even reach forty minutes: few solos and variations, no display of virtuosity, no oddities or self-indulgence, the Deaf Leopard has always preferred making songs rather than jam sessions, seeking and finding above all compactness and choral success in their proposal of “heavy” but harmonious pop, noisy yet rounded.