Dave Q ponders Van Halen

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1411

Good lord, no. Anything but.

Eh, well, I'm positive I've got that somewhere in my collection, which is currently in the basement of a house 80 miles away from me, but if I remember it the next time I'm there...nah, never mind, won't happen.

I would be the last to know. You're all in praise of unreadable material?

http://lead-zepp.cool.ne.jp/p4026ed/15other.JPG

(Hey, this is fun!)

Yes, Martin agree. Them fighting words. Grrrr. Make me want smash face in one time for every false harmonic in opening riff to Mean Streets. Grrrr! Smash!

2.) plus I think that's actually a regular clarinet in "Big Bad Bill", not a bass clarinet.

Correct. It is merely a clarinet. It is played by Eddie's pops though.

and the rest from Dave's Diver Down review:

3.) the underrated Women & Children First

What? I think it's pretty fairly rated in the pre-Diver Down output: Not as good as anything before and not as good as Fair Warning, which could rock the nuts off of just about anybody.

4.) a detail of his famous adhesive-taped guitar was the cover art [for Diver Down]

Is this a sly joke? Because the cover is the damn flag/symbol for "diver down." One of several safety-minded markings used by actual divers.

5.) "Cathedral" makes one wish that Eddie wouldn’t record these cool sounds as soon as he thinks of them but instead invent something else for them to do besides ascending triads/arpeggios (to be fair, he does a descending minor-scale exercise at the end of this one)

Come on, man. Complaining about the simplicity of a short instrumental track on a fucking rock record is just silly. Most of that record is I IV V song structures and pentatonic (or derivative) scales. JUST LIKE MOST OF MOST ROCK RECORDS.

I'm pretty damned rockist myself, but even I think criticism based on the complexity/difficulty of a song is retarded. It might have made more sense to say that there's no good reason why the unmemorable "Cathedral" appears on the album.

Similarly, I don't get "...but it’s too confusing, because Roth sings bass through the first two lines then switches to lead for the middle part." I mean, how is that confusing, Dave? You pretty much just nailed it in one sentence. He sings one part throught he first two lines and then switches to sing another.

I also think Diver Down is a crappy-to-meh record compared to pretty much everything else [Roth-era] Van Halen ever did, but there are many many ways to voice this opinion without resorting to the written equivalent of masturbating to hear yourself talk.

This is what I meant by "unreadable." If he was James Joyce and the Van Halen review was Ulysses, it might be worth the effort.

HOWEVER, in the case of the Diver Down review I feel that many of the asides and tangents are unfounded, poorly-explained or just downright incorrect. So it gives me the impression that it was less of an exercise in having something concrete to say and more of an exercise in not making sense while sounding obtuse.