Review Summary: The aural equivalent of a cold beverage on a hot day – not a particularly impressive or even memorable experience, but pleasurable enough in the moment to be worth revisiting again.
The world of music – like that of any creative art – is one where stagnation is as undesirable as it is inevitable. No matter how hard musicians (and artists in general) strive to stay relevant and continue innovating into the twilight of their career, it is but the very notable exception which manages to avoid settling into its own status quo in the long run.
The hard rock scene is certainly no exception to this rule – on the contrary, it is somewhat infamous for it; one of the genres most prone to having bands stick around for multiple decades after their peak, it stands to reason that it should also be one of the genres where conformity and repetition most often rear their heads. It is, therefore, up to each individual act to choose whether to go softly into that gentle night, or continue the fruitless pursuit for innovation in a career often entering its third or fourth decade; and while examples of the latter are certainly not uncommon (one has but to think of the likes of Poison, for instance) most major bands have opted for the former path, choosing to age gracefully deep inside their comfort zone. Case in point: Def Leppard, who, forty-five years and twelve albums deep into an already extremely successful career, choose to offer up another dose of the exact same formula they have been pursuing for almost a quarter of a century at this point.
For that is precisely what
Diamond Star Halos is, no more and no less: fifteen tracks of the same sort of pop-adjacent, radio-friendly AOR/MOR the British five-piece have been serving up since 1999's
Euphoria. Most of these fifteen tracks present the kind of perfectly listenable, mostly forgettable pop-rock fare - with the occasional moderately heavy guitar thrown in to preserve the hard rock cred - which makes up the bulk of the group's discography since the late 1990s, with every single trope that might be expected from an album of this genre being checked along the way: here are the three power ballads - one of which,
This Guitar, fully acoustic and heavily reminiscent of smash hit
Two Steps Behind - each situated precisely where they would be expectable; here the radio-ready country-rock number (
Lifeless); here the obligatory failed attempt at recreating the lightning in a bottle of
Pour Some Sugar On Me and
Let's Get Rocked (
Fire It Up, an obvious standout even if it does fall short on its impossible mission); here the somewhat catchy singalong lead single (
Kick); here the slight bit of innovation put in to justify the inevitable
'trying something new' statement (the electronic beat behind
Unbreakable). Everything is as predictable as it is pleasant, the aural equivalent of a cold beverage on a hot day – not a particularly impressive or even memorable experience, but pleasurable enough in the moment to be worth revisiting again.
Not that any of that matters, of course – twelve albums and four and a half decades into their career, it is unlikely Def Leppard are trying to entice new fans. Rather, much like recent offerings from fellow veterans AC/DC and Iron Maiden (not to mention its own four or five predecessors)
Diamond Star Halos shows the group openly and unabashedly going through the motions and preaching to the choir – though, as 'spinning their wheels'-type albums released by veteran hard'n'heavy bands these past twelve months go,
Diamond Star Halos is both a more even listening experience than the patchy
Power Up, and a more pleasurable one than the interminable
Senjutsu (even if it, too, could do with a couple of songs culled from its middle section). In fact, though far from the group's stratospherical glitz-and-glam days (and unlikely to
Adrenalize its aging audience overmuch, or indeed cause much
Hysteria or
Euphoria), Leppard's twelfth studio album sees the group soldier
On Through The Night and will leave no fan
High 'N' Dry, both maintaining the five-piece's credibility and justifying their continued existence (if only just). Not bad for a band with absolutely nothing left to prove...
Recommended Tracks
Kick
Fire It Up
This Guitar
