Def Leppard

The phenomenal Hysteria album propelled seven singles into the Top-20: "Pour Some Sugar On Me," "Animal," "Rocket," "Armageddon It," "Animal," "Love Bites," and "Hysteria," keeping Def Leppard on the charts from 1987-89. What else can you say? A true classic, filled with hit after anthemic hit.

Metal is by now a kind of folk music, as familiar in its forms as bluegrass or Appalachian
balladry. Like folk (and especially like the blues, from which it is distantly derived), metal
endlessly reshuffles a legacy of lyrical and instrumental phrases to create a music
distinguished, when at all, by the particulars of individual performance – a killer guitar
solo, a cleverly rejuvenated riff, some singer's new twist on the traditional bans... More >

You know about the music, and if you don't think you'll like it you won't: impeccable pop metal of no discernible content, it will inspire active interest only in AOR programmers and the several million addicts of the genre. In short, it's product--but as product, significant, because it's product for the CD age. Stuck with over an hour of material after four years (after all, could twelve songs be any shorter?), they elected to put it all on one disc because as technocrats they instinctively conceive for formats that can accommodate an hour of music: cassettes, which now outsell vinyl discs, and CDs, which outdollar them. The cassette sound is a little too dim, as commercial cassette sound usually is, and though I sometimes find myself preferring the depth of the vinyl once I've turned my amp up to six or seven, the clarity of the CD gets more and more decisive as the needle approaches the outgroove. I mean, I have trouble perceiving these guys as human beings under ideal circumstances. Not docked a notch because at least they didn't pad it into a double. (Grade - C)