Van Halen

Best of Both Worlds

Keep the Worlds Separate!!

Review Score:

(4/10)
Luckily, I never bought Best of Vol I. So this is a better value for me than others. I am satisfied with the song selection from the Roth era, which is the only thing I was interested in. Like others have noted, Roth and Hagar each serve a different audience that have little in common. Roth VH caters to the traditional long-haired hard rock demographic of the early-80s and Hagar VH is for the trimmed and primped top 40 radio audience.

Bearing the above in mind, that brings me to my main beef with this compilation - why on earth did they interlace each track with a different vocalist, i.e. Roth, Hagar, Roth, Hagar, Roth, Hagar, etc. That is beyond annoying! You have to buy both disks with the package. Why does the record company care if you only end up listening to one of them? They still get their money. It's like they're telling me "you better listen to Sammy, too, or he might feel bad."

Now I have to burn all the Roth tracks on to a CD-R in order to avoid pressing the skip button on my stereo remote every four minutes (not to mention switching from disk 1 to disk 2). The three new tracks are not very impressive. The guitar playing is heavier but sounds tuned way down. The lyrics are completely moronic. Way immature for guys in their fifties. I would rather have 'Beat It' on here than 'Up for Breakfast.'

Not worth $20 in my estimation. (I got it for $14.99 by the way.)

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