01. Runnin' with the Devil
02. Eruption
03. You Really Got Me
04. Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love
05. I'm the One
It didn’t sound at first listen like something to change the course of rock music. When Van Halen’s self-titled debut came to market on February 10, 1978, it received substantial media attention, earned reviews that ranged from enthused to ennui-filled, and sold well behind a solid push from Warner Bros. Records. Its landing was substantial, but didn’t seem as momentous as it would later prove to be. The four-piece California band didn’t spawn a procession of imitators (as a full enterprise, that is; one member’s innovations have been pilfered virtually non-stop for a generation), nor change the course of how rock music was made, but its debut marked a turning point, one achieved by the considerably more difficult trick of changing the audience itself.
Van Halen broadened hard rock’s audience with music that appealed to the mainstream without putting off purists. Over the course of its six-album original-lineup run, the band opened the door for hard rock on the pop charts, and made an ever-increasing number of Top 40 listeners receptive to music previously limited to AOR stations. Even then, the group retained substantial credibility as a rock enterprise for the simplest of reasons—no one would ever have dared call guitarist Eddie Van Halen a pretender.
The younger of the two Van Halen brothers who gave the band its ultimate name (it had been Mammoth until 1974), Eddie drove the group’s signature sound with guitar riffs built on explosive virtuosity much more digestible than the average blowout interlude. Combined with the loopy charm of vocalist David Lee Roth, the band sported two unique appeals, a combination of musical proficiency and party-animal joie de vivre not easily duplicated.
On its debut, those qualities were in place, though at a smaller scale than would manifest on later records. Eddie Van Halen would later express regret that the band’s first single was a cover tune, yet the group’s take on “You Really Got Me” is an ideal introduction. Reimagining the Kinks’ classic with substantial heft, the track finds Roth chomping on scenery, punctuating lyrics with charismatic howls and sharp wails, while rhythmic electric guitar prods its pace before breaking into a decorative and memorable fill. Oozing broad personality and lively energy, the song reached as high as #36 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and fueled the collection reaching as high as #19 on Billboard’s album chart, a harbinger of things to come.
Though its path hadn’t been meteoric, Van Halen was always on someone’s radar. A fixture on the Southern California music scene once it locked in its classic lineup of Roth, Eddie Van Halen, his drummer brother Alex and bass player Michael Anthony, the quartet saw little result from 1976 demos financed by Gene Simmons. The following year, Warners’ Ted Templeman and Mo Ostin attended a performance at Hollywood’s Starwood, and signed them soon after. By fall, the band was at Sunset Sound with producer Templeman, who shepherded a three-week recording process.
The direction of their collaboration is audible from the opening of the album’s first track (and second single), “Runnin’ With the Devil.” An approaching train (could be an aggressive car) horn decelerates as it nears, Anthony’s mechanical bass throbs from its remains, and a drizzle of piano cues drums and swatches of gritty electric guitar that aren’t at all showy. Roth jumps in with a caterwaul, then plays with the lyric. It’s nice enough, but hardly distinguished. Then, just under its two-minute mark, Eddie jumps in with a sizzling guitar fill that’s just 10 seconds long, but punctuates the entire enterprise and unveils the tonal quality that would be as much a signature of his work as its technique. It’s a meshing of pop and rock that doesn’t surrender its edge, a thunderous heralding of the group’s strongest appeals in nascent forms. From: https://bestclassicbands.com/van-halen-debut-album-review-8-20-18/
