Def Leppard Revives It's '80s Rock 'N' Roll Glory Days
Rock 'n' roll was never really meant to encourage dignity in either its players or its fans, and the 1980s subgenre unkindly, accurately tagged "hair metal" was especially silly and, three decades and more later, has aged like spray cheese.
Yet Def Leppard carried itself with some pride onstage at the Marcus Amphitheater Wednesday night, and with some right to, because it was never entirely soaked in hair metal's mousse and held onto the more rigorous and bracing braggadocio of harder rock.
Some of the U.K. quintet's best songs happen to come from its era of greatest success — from 1983 to 1992 — and while some of those songs also happened to get the best responses from the crowd, they stood upright without the crutch of nostalgia.
"Foolin'," for example, retained its palpable tang of desperate lust, which lead singer Joe Elliott was still able to evoke 33 years after the single parked itself on rock radio and fueled countless late-night calls flooded with manfully tearful begging.
For another example, "Animal," from 1987's blockbuster album "Hysteria," hadn't lost any of its summer-affair evocations even when Elliott's voice inexplicably wandered a half-step above or below the melody line.
Other songs, like "Armageddon It," also from "Hysteria," survived more on good parts, such as Elliott's low-register insinuation that the lyrics were somehow dirty, than on the overall setup and follow-through.
The newest songs, from last year's "Def Leppard," were made up almost entirely of slightly modified good parts from older songs, with "Dangerous" so close to the chugging drive of the 1983 LP "Pyromania" that it could have been mistaken for a B-side or outtake from that time.
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