Vocalist Joe Elliott has described lead single and opening track, “Let’s Go”, as “a call to arms and a classic Def Leppard song. It won a 2016 Classic Rock Roll of Honours Award for Album of the Year. The album was produced by Ronan McHugh and Def Leppard. The first single “Let’s Go” was released 15 September 2015, alongside the artwork and tracklisting. Leppard’s first studio album since Songs from the Sparkle Lounge (2008) (marking the longest gap between two studio albums in their career) and they’re first on earMUSIC Records, it became their seventh top ten albums after debuting on the Billboard 200 at number 10. It has plenty of balls, lots of charm and a packet of irresistible melodies.Def Leppard is the self-titled eleventh studio album by the English rock band of the same name, released on 30 October 2015. The keyboards in the bridge sound a bit twee, but Photograph has still worn really well. The formula rock hit hadn’t yet been discovered. What’s interesting is that while Photograph is clearly radio and MTV- friendly metal, it doesn’t in any way sound like most of the identikit stuff that clogged up US airwaves later in the decade. The enormous hit that took Leppard out of the metal ballpark, then turned them into bona fide globe-straddling rock superstars. Billy’s Got A Gun is interesting, because in many ways it crystallises Pyromania, an album that took an age-old formula and reworked it so it became something shiny and new. Again, there’s a bit of that old UFO influence here, as Joe Elliott channels Phil Mogg’s knack for telling gritty stories about inner city violence. The band go for atmosphere on the album closer as Leppard stretch out and come up with a big number that clocks in at just shy of six minutes. The lyrics are a bit ‘nyeh’, (“play the game, surrender to me” etc.) but the song is one of the best examples of Leppard’s ability to shift gears and move from soft to hard and back again on a number of occasions – and all in the space of a single song. Not a track that immediately springs to mind when you think of Pyromania, but this is, in fact, a much-underrated tune. A clever arrangement is also the order of the day, which is surely down to the hand of Mutt. The pre-chorus, in particular, the ‘oh, I just gotta know…’ bit, makes this a real earworm. The riffs are tough, but it’s clear that the band worked double hard on creating catchy melodies here from first note to last. More mid-paced driving music that was gobbled up by American radio stations. “Women to the left and women to the right,” he notes, as the band make no bones about the fact that they can rock hard – when they want to. But then the mood changes, the AC/DC riffs are dusted off and Elliott even starts doing a bit of a Beano. Pyromania starts with what could almost be described as prog pop, if you can imagine such a thing.
It’s not bad, just a little bit ordinary. Shame the tune itself is a bit of a let-down. But what’s surprising is that the lyric deals – albeit obliquely – with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as Elliott recounts a tale of a returning soldier who can’t leave the battlefield behind. The helicopter sounds at the beginning give us a hint of where we’re going, to a song that deals with war and, presumably, Vietnam.
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