Released: 1983
Tracks: Rock Rock (Till You Drop); Photograph; Stagefright; Too Late For Love; Die Hard the Hunter; Foolin’; Rock of Ages; Comin’ Under Fire; Action! Not Words; Billy’s Got a Gun
Best track: hard to pick…probably Stagefright
Tracks to skip: Rock Rock Till You Flop, Comin Under Fire, Action! Not Words
What’s with that ending of Billy’s Got a Gun? Makes no sense. This is obviously Def Leppard’s third album and the one that really catapulted them into mega-platinum status. As of this writing the album is now 21 years old so naturally all of it isn’t going to hold up as well as it did say 10-15 years back. When I first put this in and Rock Rock came on, my first thought was, oh noooooo, this hasn’t aged well! Good thing is that it’s mostly just for that song. I really hate songs about ‘The Rock Cause’ or whatever. I do not like it when people sing rock songs about the concept of ‘rock’ itself. Or any music for that matter. It’s stupid and serves no other purpose other than to act like you’re including the fans in what you’re doing. Yeah, we’re all in this together, fighting for ROCK. Whoopie. So yeah, Rock Rock Rock Rock is a dumb song and Rock of Ages has a stupid idea (more ROCK!), but at least it’s a better-written song. I like that chorus (the music, silly).
The main single off this album was of course Photograph, a song that you can probably still hear 10 times per day on the radio. I still like it. They wrote a good one and it deserved to be a hit. The other big ones were Too Late For Love and Foolin’, both songs that I enjoy. After the initial annoyance of Rock Rock, this album does settle in to some good stuff. The next 6 tracks are all pretty solid. I don’t really care too much for Joe Elliot’s voice on here, when he tries to scream it sounds pretty bad. I like the guitars here, as Steve Clark and Phil Collen always wrote some nice stuff. The bass and drums (Rick Savage & Rick Allen) are the things that kinda bore me about Def Leppard. It’s way too simple for my taste. Sometimes it can work, I really like Rick Savage’s bass line for the verses of Foolin’. The trademark of the band, besides the guitars, is clearly the background vocals. It’s almost annoying. People like it though, so they’re not afraid to overdo it and have these huge vocal parts on seemingly random words. No matter, I’m always listening to the music anyway. Overall I still like this. It hasn’t aged as well as I thought it would, and if you asked me to review this 10 years ago it’d get a much higher grade.
Rating: 85
January 13, 2008, 
8:23 pm
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