Every Van Halen album ranked from worst to best

http://teamrock.com/feature/2016-11-07/every-van-halen-album-ranked-from-worst-to-best

Every Van Halen album ranked from worst to best
Features / by Paul Elliott

Van Halen revolutionised hard rock when they came shrieking out of Pasadena in the 1970s, and have sold millions of albums since. Here they are, ranked from disastrous to dazzling

If ever a rock band epitomised the American Dream, it’s Van Halen. Formed in Pasadena, California in 1974 by four teenage kids from families that had migrated across the Atlantic in the pursuit of happiness, Van Halen were loud, brash, shamelessly ambitious, larger than life, and classically all-American. So was their pioneering spirit.

Van Halen revolutionised hard rock music. When the band’s debut album was released in 1978, punk had unsettled rock’s old order. Giants such as Zeppelin and Sabbath were on their last legs. But VH had seen the future. “This is the 1980s!” declared singer David Lee Roth, boldly if prematurely. “And this is the new sound — it’s hyper, it’s energy, it’s urgent.”

The key to that new sound was Eddie Van Halen, whose innovative two-handed “tapping” technique made him the most influential guitarist since Hendrix. But this wasn’t a one-man show. Eddie’s brother Alex went at his drum-kit like a prizefighter. Bassist Michael Anthony underpinned Eddie’s histrionics and provided killer back-up vocals that had him rightly described as the band’s “secret weapon”. And then, of course, there was ‘Diamond Dave’, a wisecracking, split-jumping, super-toned blond Adonis, son of second-generation Jewish immigrants, and heavy metal’s greatest showman. As Roth stated, “I once heard somebody say to the Van Halens. ‘You guys play the music; the Jew sells it.’ Well, you’re fucking right!”

The band made six classic albums with Roth in a golden era that ran until 1985 when the singer quit to go solo. Amazingly, the band went on to even greater commercial success with Roth’s replacement, Sammy Hagar, with albums such as 5150 and OU812. The only major lowpoint in Van Halen’s history was in 1998, when former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone fronted the band for one disastrous album. But eventually, in 2006, the Van Halen brothers buried the hatchet with Roth. And this reunion — which yielded the 2012 album A Different Kind Of Truth — continues to the present day, albeit with Eddie’s son Wolfgang on bass instead of Michael Anthony.

Here, every Van Halen album is ranked from worst to best — beginning at the very bottom with poor old Gary Cherone…

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