New Music Reviews - Home of DJ Willis

“How you feel about “Songs From the Sparkle Lounge” will depend almost entirely on how you react when the hand claps turn up on the final chorus of “Nine Lives,” a highly carbonated country-rocker (co-starring Tim McGraw) that’s designed to trigger all the synapses in your head that still have parts of “Hysteria” rattling around them. The band’s first new set since 2002 is full of these well-intentioned attempts to recapture some of that ’80s pyromania (or in the case of the absurdly large power ballad “Love,” herculean ’70s prog-rock balladry), but without producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, who left for the much more profitable world of country years ago, the results are solid if unspectacular. It’s tough to imagine “Sparkle Lounge” putting the Lep back out front for long, but there are a handful of tracks here that’ll sound pretty good on tour this summer. —Jeff Vrabel”