Tatoo Single Download

I’m curious what influence John Shanks had on this tune.

mrmojohalen:
I’m curious what influence John Shanks had on this tune.

The keyboards?

If you can’t get it yet, or haven’t got it yet, it’s up on youtube in full:

Kinda poor sound quality, but not too bad.

http://vimeo.com/34261064

Until the album is released, I just ripped the audio from the Youtube video.

Video of the Day: Van Halen, “Tattoo”
Posted by staticblog
on January 10, 2012M at 11:30 am

Blame our older brothers for blasting them out of their six-by-nine coaxial speakers every morning, or blame the late-1970s rock radio programmers desperate for an American hard rock band to champion, or just blame us, damn it, because for all the cool we tried to accumulate over the course of three decades we just could not let go of them, but at least two generations of suburban kids got the aesthetics of their genetics altered by Van Halen. Most of us only became aware of Led Zeppelin after they were gone, so what we had left in the early 1980s was the popped-up, sexed-up, goofball-adrenaline Sunset Stripped version, and without exposure to punk, Van Halen became a tool of parental irritation supreme and the insanely loud expression of the teenage id, and in its own way, it rocked hard.

And this is why we cut 75 percent of Van Halen so much slack for so long. After David Lee Roth left/was fired/otherwise went solo, we tried to like the Sammy Hagar version for 10 years until that thing ran into the ditch. Then Roth reunited with the Van Halen brothers and Michael Anthony for about five minutes in 1996, recorded some translucently pale imitations of classic-era VH and split again, which is why the dissolute and disposable 1998 Gary Cherone version made 99.9738 percent of the dwindling fan base want to take Edward’s “Pancake” drill to their eardrums: it wasn’t entirely because the Cherone-led Van Halen sucked like a Dyson, although it did. It was because we were tired of being jerked around by guys who could not understand just how uninteresting they were without one another, and hiring the guy from Extreme just felt like the Van Halen Boys had gotten cocky, believing that they could hire any damn guy (or Sass Jordan, apparently) to front them. They were greeted with a collective “no” and got sent to the wilderness for 10 years.

So after the health scares, questionable cures, the wired-up Roth/Hagar cross-country hatefest and a Hagar/Van Halen reunion tour that seemed to everyone watching like something much smaller than a half measure, Roth reunited with the Van Halens, who brought in Edward’s son Wolfgang after Michael Anthony sided with Sammy. The 2008 tour was big, bountiful and full of reasonably convincing love, and Roth seemed more like himself than he had since about 1986.

And now we have “Tattoo,” the first single from “A Different Kind of Truth,” due out on Interscope on February 7. This midtempo slight return about a housewife getting a tramp stamp and some palaver about the Civil War features the band sounding more like itself than it has in nearly three decades, mainly because Roth is present and accounted for, and it works for the most part because our standards for these guys are down somewhere around “just don’t embarrass yourself.” They do far better than that for three guys pushing 60 and another pushing legal drinking age.

Just in terms of population statistics, Van Halen is still at 75 percent, but in real musical math, the new Van Halen is actually about 10 percentage points higher than that. Still, that 15 percent is missed: we can all hear those missing drunken choirboy vocals that should be in the background but are conspicuously absent, and the production on “Tattoo” is way too compressed, lacking the built-for-arenas spaciousness that Ted Templeman brought to VH’s classic period. But it’s better than “Me Wise Magic,” way better than anything on “Van Halen III,” and feels more like the real thing than anything since “5150.”

Yes, this amount of attention is nothing but irrational. I know that. But some of us just cannot repair that adolescent damage.

ron:
Just listened to the new song via local radio.Previously only heard the 30 sec sample, and haven’t watched the video.

Song is okay.Wish it moved faster.The DLR Announcer Voice that comes in startled me a bit.Thought the outro didn’t fit well, but liked the sound it.Wish Dave would sing a bit less over some of the guitar parts.

So, a rating based on the first listen…. Middle of the road 3 out of 5 from me.

Agreed Ron.

On the first few listens, I’m not a huge fan of the song.

It seems like someone understood that Roth can’t sing high anymore and it reveals his age when he reaches for the high notes.

And I think Eddie’s playing sounds very good. His solo is excellent, albeit in a 1987 sense. He’s never going to play like he did in 1977. It’s just impossible.

The big problem to me is that this isn’t a great VH riff song. The verse riff from Down in Flames was never strong to begin with. So right there the song cuts against what made classic VH great. I can’t think of a single VH song from 78-84 that didn’t have a great riff.

The other thing missing here is Michael’s vocals. There’s no question the song would sound less like solo Roth or Foreigner or whatever if MA was hitting those high harmonies and actually, Roth is the one who comes off the worst for it.

The optimistic side of me says that 1. Roth sounds decent. 2. Eddie’s playing better than he has in a decade. 3. Wolf is a good bass player, so the rest of the album should be good. If they reworked some of the great unreleased demo stuff like ‘put out the lights’, ‘big trouble,’ along with ‘bullethead’ and she’s the woman, the album could be a good, although not great VH record.

ffoner:
The sample link is back up at Amazon. I’m guessing it will go live at midnight….

Oddly enough, it doesn’t appear to be available through Amazon. When I questioned Amazon about this, I got the following reply:

I’ve checked our catalog and found “Tattoo” isn’t currently available in the Amazon MP3 Store and I’m sorry for the disappointment.

We’re constantly establishing and improving our agreements with record companies so we can offer the largest range of content possible. We’re working hard to ensure that all purchases from the Amazon MP3 Music Downloads store are free of digital rights management restrictions. Unfortunately, this prevents us from offering products from some record companies.

Further, I’ve forwarded your comments to Amazon MP3 team for consideration. It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects.