Okay, first things first. Before you do anything else with OU812, flip it over and cue up "Source of Infection," the opening salvo on side two (you CD fiends can just program track 5), and let 'er rip. While Eddie Van Halen sprays you with a machine-gun succession of speed-metal-guitar arpeggios, Sammy Hagar sends out the party invitations with his usual savoir-faire – "Hey! All right! Whoo!" Alex Van Halen and Michael Anthony, of course, take him at his word, shooting into hyper-beat space before you can say, "Jump."
grumbling, did not wimp out when Diamond Dave hit the bricks. Nor did the band go – ugh! – pop: the
5150 ladies' choice "Why Can't This Be Love" wasn't really a ballad; it was more like Big Rock Melancholia. In fact, all the
5150-model Van Halen did was replace one mighty mouth with another and trot out some hip, new songwriting tricks. "Source of Infection," an A-bomb blast of sass 'n' thrash in the great VH tradition of "I'm the One" (
Van Halen) and "Hot for Teacher" (
1984), should be proof enough that Van Halen can still
waaaagh like no other arena-stadium combo on the planet.
Still even Van Halen recognizes there is more to life than waaaagh. Not much more, to be sure. The better part of OU812 (as in "Oh, you ate one, too") is about nothing more complicated than the horizontal rumba, with Anthony on bass and the Van Halen brothers cranking out high-decibel bump and grind behind Hagar's spirited play-by-play.
The album actually commences, though, with a rare stab at spirituality, in "Mine All Mine." Lyrically, it's basically a shorthand self-help sermon ("Stop lookin' out Start lookin' in Be your own best friend"). But the arrangement – with Eddie's chordal chunks of almost jazzy guitar, the migraine throb of the beat backfield, a moody keyboard glaze and the boys' sunny background oohing during the melodic bended-knee breaks – speaks volumes about the band's desire to find new ways of making the old noise.
The curve balls, though, don't always hit the strike zone. "Finish What Ya Started" is an unexpected turn into wheat-field-rock country. Eddie tones down his six-string slashing into a kind of Ry Cooder-country-blues cluck, and the song – with its relaxed air of acoustic understatement – is a nice breather from the album's dominant monster stomp. But it skirts a little too close to Mellencamp turf to be convincing and lacks a knockout hook, a particularly noticeable handicap with the volume turned down so low.
On the other hand, the Hagar incarnation of Van Halen has gotten quite good at whacking out high-potency, mush-free love songs. While "Feels So Good" and "When It's Love" are admittedly cut from the same cloth as "Why Can't This Be Love," it
