The production offers a more brittle approximation of Mutt Lange's painstaking wall of sound, and although most of the album is given over to stainless-steel rockers forged from trusty metal clichés, the most notable track is "Love", an acoustic guitar-based piece that suddenly expands a few minutes in with Queen-style compressed harmonies and widdly guitars, like a self-inflating rubber dinghy. But Def Leppards music had always employed big, anthemic hooks, and few of the pop-metal bands who had hit the charts in the wake of Pyromania could compete with Leppards sense of craft certainly none had the pop songwriting savvy to produce seven chart singles from the same album, as the stunningly consistent Hysteria did. Def Leppard Top Songs 1: Love Bites 2: Lets Get Rocked 3: Armageddon It 4: Pour Some Sugar on Me 5: When Love and Hate Collide. Less appealingly (though aptly), the ghosts of Mötley Crüe and Poison are hanging around their chippy critique of celebrity culture, "Bad Actress". With Songs from the Sparkle Lounge, the band try to regain their earlier spirit, but mostly succeed in summoning up polite echoes of former glories, some not even their own: the strident "Hallucinate" could be by Bryan Adams, the arpeggiated guitar of "Gotta Let It Go" recalls "(Don't Fear) the Reaper", and "Come Undone" opens like some heavy metal alchemist's dream combination of "Kashmir" and "Freebird". Def Leppard's career arc has been steadily declining since the heady mid-Eighties heights of Pyromania and Hysteria.
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