Retro Active - Def Leppard (CD 1993)

Oftentimes, as a band is compiling songs for their albums, there are quite a number of songs that get recorded but don t make the final cut. As a result, some otherwise very good songs never see the light of day. But every now and then, bands will revisit the material that was previously overlooked, and release it under a separate recording effort. Call it laziness or complacency, but when Def Leppard did this very thing with their CD Retro Active, they put out a CD that s almost better than most of their other stuff. Track Listing: 1. Desert Song 2. Fractured Love 3. Action 4. Two Steps...

I had stopped buying Def Leppard CDs for a while there after Hysteria (there was that embarrassing flirtation with Michael Bolton, what was I thinking?) However, I took a job at an unnamed used CD shoppe which later fired me because they realized that, in the course of all those raises they had given me over the years I had come to earn nearly $2 above minimum wage. I was suddenly too expensive and must go. But in the course of my time there I made out like a bandit in the CD department. I believe when I started I owned a grand total of 5 CD and when I left, that number had mushroomed...

Whereas their seventh album, Vault, was a collection of greatest hits from 1980 to 1995 (successfully rounding-out the first chapter of the band's as-of-then 16-year career), Def Leppard's sixth LP, Retro Active, is a collection of B-sides and unfinished song ideas from the Pyromania, Hysteria, and Adrenalize recording sessions. Released in 1993, it proved to be a very solid rock album, not only by the band's own traditional standards, but by itself in a heavily-dominated "grunge" market, as well. It had been two years since the death of guitarist and close friend, Steve Clark (1961-1991),...

Retroactive, released in 1992, is actually an 'odds and sods' collection of B-sides and rarities from as early as Pyromania up to the Adrenalize sessions. Def Leppard, after the continuing, chart topping success of albums like Adrenalize, Hysteria, and Pyromania, were in somewhat of a rut after 1991. Adrenalize was riding high, but a changing of the guard was looming with Nirvana taking hold of the music scene. Their founding guitarist Steve Clark had died during the recording of Adrenalize, and they were looking to change their direction somewhat. In order to do that, however, they felt...