Van Halen

Balance

Decent, but kind of a letdown

Review Score:

(6/10)
"Balance" was an album I absolutely hated when it first came out in early 1995. Grunge/alternative was in full swing and I expected Van Halen to deliver some good dumbed-down arena rock to take me away from all the plodding, whiny, self-important tripe being put out in that era. Instead, I got Van Halen's most intellectual album to date, with a lot of moody pieces that seemed to be trying to mimic the climate of the times. Over time though I grew to like it somewhat, although I think it is still pretty low on my list of favorite VH albums.

Ironically, the two songs that qualify as dumbed-down arena rock, "Big Fat Money" and "Amsterdam" are actually the weakest on the album. Musically, "Amsterdam" is an excellent (if predictable) VH song, but the lyrics - "Wam bam, oh Amsterdam, stones you like nothing else can" - pure poetry there, Hagar. And "Big Fat Money" is just plain lame on all levels. Van Halen proved they could do quasi-speed metal with "Get Up" from "5150", but this is just a sloppy mess. In press interviews for promoting this album Hagar described "Big Fat Money" as "this album's `Panama' or `Why Can't This Be Love'," but let me tell you, he was just plain WRONG.

"Can't Stop Loving You", as the title suggests, is equally trite but this one works well. It's unashamedly pop, with a chime-sounding guitar tone similar to Def Leppard's later work.

Keyboards are intentionally low key here, with only the organic ballad "Not Enough" getting a bit of piano treatment. "Not Enough" is hardly the best ballad VH has ever done, but it's at least a nice change from the synth-heavy stuff they had been churning out since the "1984" days. "Take Me Back" is another stripped-down ballad that works well.

"Aftershock" has a verse similar to the 1970 R&B tune "Get Ready" by Rare Earth. Beyond that, it's a pretty by-the-numbers VH tune, meaning it blows away virtually everything by any other band of a similar ilk, but it's still got a been-there-done-that feel to it.

"Don't Tell Me (What Love Can Do)" is your basic heady-lyrics song, supposedly inspired by the suicide of Kurt Cobain. It was a decent first single, but not among Van Halen's finest work.

The rest of it - "Seventh Seal", "Feelin'", and the three (?!?) instrumentals "Baluchiterum", "Doin' Time" and "Strung Out" all fill things out nicely, but overall this is a rather unspectacular VH album. Better than "OU812", "Van Halen 3", and I would probably even hold it up against "Van Halen II" (my least favorite disc from the Roth years), but it was a pretty big letdown after the wait for something new and exciting in the midst of all the dreary and depressing grunge all over the radio in 1995.

More Reviews: