Contributed By: Sybru
Created On: Sunday, 27 April 2008
Hits: 174
 Songs From The Sparkle Lounge Target, Best Buy, WalMart, and iTunes each tacked unique inclusions onto their copies of the album, and the band held a prize giveaway on their website that could only be entered by the fans that were willing buy a copy of Yeah! from each location. The result: Def Leppard’s 10th consecutive Top 20 album. Maybe that’s too cynical, but at the very least, it’s clear that the track listing has been structured in an attempt to win new fans rather than please those who’ve stuck by the band. Songs from the Sparkle Lounge kicks off with “Go,” one of the least successful album openers in the band’s career; despite its grinding guitars and pounding drum beat, the song offers precious little in the way of a hook, instead only seeming to shout, “Listen to us as we hold our own with today’s hard-rock artists!”.
Next up is “Nine Lives,” the aforementioned Tim McGraw collaboration, which starts with the requisite twang that’s inevitable with such a pairing, but after a great pre-chorus, the song’s actual chorus is a complete bore; it’s therefore nothing more than a testament to the power of name recognition in marketing that the track was selected to be used as the opening for ABC’s NBA broadcasts this season. Left languishing in the #3 slot is “C’mon, C’mon,” a glam-rock stomper equipped with lyrics that would’ve made so much better a starting point for the record (“Baby, baby, won’t you give me a good time? / Squeeze me, please me, make it feel like the last time”) that one can’t imagine it wasn’t originally intended as such by the band. From there, things settle into a familiar Def Leppard groove that the faithful will no doubt appreciate.
“Tomorrow” and “Hallucinate” are classic melodic rockers, “Love” is a Queen-inspired ballad which explodes into a symphony of riffs and harmonies just after the three-minute mark, and “Only the Good Die Young” (not the Billy Joel song) is one of the catchiest pop-rock songs that the band has delivered in years. “Bad Actress,” meanwhile, succeeds everywhere that “Go” fails, with the group completely kicking out the jams and sounding more energized than they have in years. Despite these victories, however, Songs from the Sparkle Lounge still occasionally suffers from many of the same problems that plagued X, feeling like Def Leppard by the numbers more often than it should…but does the fault lie with the band, feeling like they need to stick perilously close to their established sound to keep their fans happy, or is Mercury to blame because the familiar is easier for them to market? (The probable answer: a little from Column A, a little from Column B.)
 
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