As it was with the Sixties, the back end of the Seventies is starting to produce artists and sounds that feel more like they belong in the Eighties. Here are the opening salvoes of the Hair Metal sound, the dominant direction of American (and some German) rock for the next few years.
Because of that it’s perhaps easy to look back on Van Halen as a bit cheesy, a bit of a cliche, but here they’re inventing a new sound, and in context of the time they are pioneers. Sure, Eddie Van Halen draws somewhat from prior rock guitarists – Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmoor especially – but he also makes the same kind of quantum leap that Hendrix did in his time. Super-fast hammer-ons (hammers-on?) up the neck of the guitar, with a Hendrix-like deft use of distortion thrown in to make the guitar (his distinctive “Frankenstrat”) alternatively sing and growl.
So much so that they give him a track – the appropriately named Explosion – all to himself; just under 2 minutes of pure guitar solo all by itself, and there’s enough there to sustain it. Compare with, say Chicago or Yes that also give their guitarist a solo track, and it’s at least the best of the three, a primer for teenage guitar heroes from now on.
Atomic Punk is reminiscent of Black Sabbath at their best (before the coke), with David Lee Roth’s vocals not a million miles from Ozzy, one of the heavier tracks on the album. Feel Your Love Tonight, meanwhile, feels more like its American predecessors on this list – Alice Cooper and Aerosmith, as well as being more like more melodic direction of hair metal, with its harmonies and bouncier feel. Ice Cream Man is a cover of an old Chicago Blues song that starts out acoustic and becomes rockier, which reminded me of David Lee Roth’s cover of Just a Gigolo – evidently he was interested in this kind of thing for a while.
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