Van Halen II (1979)
1. You're No Good
2. Dance the Night Away
3. Somebody Get Me a Doctor
4. Bottoms Up!
5. Outta Love Again
6. Light Up the Sky
7. Spanish Fly
8. D.O.A.
9. Women in Love...
10.Beautiful Girls
If there was ever a perfect title for
an album......
This one immediately kicks in right where its
predecessor leaves off. Such could be the case many years ago. Record
companies were more patient with new artists - letting them grow, mature
and gain a solid following without putting immense pressure to return an
immediate yield on investment. To be truthful, the first Van Halen album didn't sell that well.
So no one was really that familiar with their sound yet. So it was
perfectly acceptable to put out a carbon copy to give the band a bit
more exposure. Which is exactly what this record did.
They still weren't a household name, but the classic (and best thing
here) Dance the Night Away did get substantial airplay. So more
people were getting the news of this wild and wacky bunch of hedonistic
rockers. To be completely fair, the album isn't quite as good as
their freshman effort, but not much else is (by anyone). Other killer tracks
include Beautiful Girls, Bottoms Up! and D.O.A..
Eddie treats us to more guitar virtuoso, with his instrumental
Spanish Fly, which is more in the acoustic vein then his similar solo
excursion on the first album. David Lee Roth is full of yelpings, 'oh
yeahs!', and 'yowz!' throughout the record, so nothing's changed that much there.
Michael Anthony proves that his vocal harmonies are, indeed, a
very large part of this band's sound - adding just the right elements by
giving the band a bit of something actually sounding a bit professional
as opposed to Roth's all-out party squealching.
There are a couple of points that are less than spectacular - but only
slightly. The opening track You're No Good (the same song Linda
Ronstandt recently did. Yep.) sounds a bit forced. It's almost as if they're
trying a bit too hard to do a Runnin' With the Devil part 2. The
album barely clocks in at over one-half hour, so that in itself makes it
a great companion to the first album. Listening to the two of these records back
to back isn't too much longer than a recent release by many bands these
days. These two albums are tons better than most anything else out
there anyways.
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