Van Halen

Tonight i went through the worst of the moldy records, trashed the jackets and washed a few. First up is the quintessential self titled debut, Van Halen. It's still a little scratchy, but no major skips after a quick dish soap sponge bath.

This album is a classic, and most every song on the album is a rock radio staple. It's essentially a live album with some guitar overdubs, and it wasn't until people became interested in what the band was doing afterward that sales finally took off.

Gene Simmons paid for their earlier three track demo. They used that demo to get some big sold out gigs, and when Warner Brothers bit they took their live set into the studio ('cause that's all they had). The price tag of this album sounds insane at $40k for what it was in 1978 (a glorified set list), but holy hand grenades it's still mind blowing today. You can't deny that Eddie was a genius, and i honestly can't name a more current guitarist who can carry an entire album by him/herself like this one.

Do yourself a favor and actually go listen to the whole album with fresh ears. There are a few tracks i haven't heard before (because i never owned a copy of this album until now), and they are really bizarre in a good way, like they were teetering on the edge of going full on heavy metal a la Judas Priest or Dio.

It's everything a "hello, Cleveland. We are Van Halen" album should be, and man does it rock.

Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more