Van Halen

Van Halen II sometimes gets lost in the shuffle since instead of the usual five undeniable classics, the album only yielded two -- David Lee Roth's manifesto of horniness on "Beautiful Girls" and the band-wide party manifesto, "Dance The Night Away." At times they sound like a Pasadena bar band but Eddie is still playing like Eddie, which means nasty, nasty, nasty.

Rock archaeologists have recently unearthed conclusive evidence (some liner notes
contained in the ancient Dead Weight Scrolls) that the subspecies of heavy metal known as
thud rock was born way back in the paleolithic mists when a certain strain of Heidelberg
man (Mondo erectus) began banging on a garbage can with the skull bone of a chimpanzee.
Predictably, these findings received scant attention in the world's music press --... More >

Never let it be said that popular styles don't evolve--in the wake of Kiss and Boston, this is heavy metal that's pure, fast, and clean. No mythopoeia, no bombast, and even the guitar features are defined as just that. So how come formalists don't love the sh*t out of these guys? Not because they're into dominating women, I'm sure. (Grade - C+)