Thursday, August 4, 2016

29 Years HYSTERIA


29 Years ago, on 3rd August 1987, The new wave british heavy metal band from Sheffield, England , released one of the reatest album in the world "Hsyteria". It is the fourth studio album, produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, released  through Mercury Records and reissued on 1 January 2000. It is the band's best-selling album to date, selling over 25 million copies worldwide, including 12 million in the US, and spawning seven hit singles. The album charted at #1 on both the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart.

The auto accident that happened to drummer Rick Allen in 1984, inspired the title of the album. It is also the last album to feature guitarist Steve Clark before his death, although songs co-written by him would appear in the band's next album, Adrenalize. The album was, at the time, one of the longest albums ever issued on a single vinyl record. It lasts 62 and a half minutes. 

Following-up to the band's 1983 breakthrough album Pyromania, Hysteria's creation took over three years and was plagued by delays, including the aftermath of the 31 December 1984 car accident that cost drummer Rick Allen his left arm. A month and a half later after the accident, Allen was out of the hospital and back with his band again, understandably bummed because he didn’t think he’d be able to keep playing drums. For drummers in popular rock bands, the use of both arms had, to that point, always been sort of a career requirement. But Leppard frontman Joe Elliott pushed a depressed Allen to meet with engineers, who’d eventually help Allen put together a mostly-electronic drum kit that he could still play with one arm missing, using his feet to trigger synthetic booms. And that triumphant story fundamentally changed the band’s sound, leading them to spend the next couple of years making their best and biggest album. So Hysteria, which turns 25 today, is a triumph of the human spirit, and it’s also an album that changed the way commercial rock sounded. It’s a special thing.

[Stereogum] Leppard was always known as a metal band, and the cyber-freaked Hysteria cover art used to scare the eight-year-old me when I saw it staring at me on the Woolworth’s music rack, the same way Iron Maiden covers would scare me (in a good way). But really, Hysteria isn’t a metal record at all. It’s the biggest, shiniest, most expensive-sounding rock record maybe ever. It’s all hooks and keyboard diddles and ahh-ahh backing vocals. And gigantic drums. Because of his disability and his brand-new drum setup, Allen didn’t play like a rock drummer anymore; he played like a mechanized beast. Leppard had always brought a serious glam-rock fixation to their sound, but with Allen playing the way he did, they took that even further, bringing the thunderously simplistic backbeat stomp of T. Rex and Gary Glitter into an era when rap and rave were in their commercial infancy. Over those gigantic beats, they layered yelps and squiggles and goofy samples and hooks so sticky that, listening to the album today for the first time in a few years, I can sing along with pretty much every word no problem. The band spent years recording and rerecording and mixing and re-mixing the thing, making it sound as glittery and humungous as they possibly could, and when it came out, they apologized for taking so long in the liner notes. But the levels of antiseptic perfection in this album takes time to achieve, and really, they had nothing to feel sorry for.

Subsequent to the album's release, Def Leppard published a book entitled Animal Instinct: The Def Leppard Story, written by Rolling Stone magazine Senior Editor David Fricke, on the three-year recording process of Hysteria and the tough times the band endured through the mid-1980s.

In 1988 Q magazine readers voted it as the 98th Greatest Album of All Time, while in 2004, the album was ranked at #464 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

All songs written and composed by Steve Clark, Phil Collen, Joe Elliott, Mutt Lange and Rick Savage. 

Track listing (Total length: 62:32)
1. "Women" (5:42)
2. "Rocket" (6:37)
3. "Animal"  (4:04)
4. "Love Bites" (5:46)
5. "Pour Some Sugar on Me" (4:27)
6. "Armageddon It" (5:24)
7. "Gods of War" (6:37)
8. "Don't Shoot Shotgun" (4:26)
9. "Run Riot" (4:39)
10. "Hysteria" (5:54)
11. "Excitable"  (4:19)
12. "Love and Affection" (4:37)







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