Pyromania [Gold Disc CD] - Def Leppard (CD 1989)

When the band Def Leppard is brought up, oh so many people consider them a relic of the hair band era that MTV gave us. They get lumped in with the Cinderellas and the Wingers and the Strypers. But while all those bands sucked (yes, Cinderella sucked people, badly I might add), in terms of creating albums that stand the test of time, Def Lep belongs more in the category of a Bon Jovi, though their latter albums haven't sold nearly as well as Jovi's (only 1999's Euphoria has gone gold since the band's last multi-platinum sales success, 1992's Adrenalize). With Pyromania, Def Leppard became one.

I suppose that everybody has an album that defined their childhood, the one that caused them to spend countless hours playing air guitar (or air ukulele, if you live in Hawaii) in front of the full-length mirror. Most white people my age probably started with KISS, and I knew more than a few black kids who spent an awful lot of time trying to master the moonwalk and Michael Jackson's voice back in the early 1980's. Hey wait, I think I did too for a brief time. In 1983, Def Leppard was the coolest group of white dudes on the planet for me. In fact, I seem to remember that Bringin' On The...

Want to feel old? Consider this. Anyone who was born during the time when Def Leppard released their breakthrough, multi-platinum, enormously popular album Pyromania can now drive, vote and, in some places, drink beer legally. 18 years. It's been 18 years since this somewhat soft metal band released that album that would change everything for them. Everything for the better, and everything for the worse. Prior to 1983's release of Pyromania, Def Leppard, an English hard-rock/metal band, garnered limited success with their debut album entitled On Through the Night (1980) and more wide-spread...

Yes, here is the which set the stage for a lot of 1980s pop metal. That's both good and bad. It's good because Pyromania is a hell of a good hard rock album. It's bad because the success of this album meant we had to hear a lot of knucklehead bands try to imitate Def Leppard's success and inflict album after album of garbage on us. The impact of Pyromania was huge, indeed, and the influence of the album has become almost larger than the disc itself. That's too bad, really, because this is one hell of a good album. If one can put aside the "historical document" status that has been attached to.