Van Halen - A Different Kind Of Truth [album review]

Released today

Well, well, well. A month ago, I was highly skeptical of Van Halen's new album based on the underwhelming "Tattoo" single. Now comes the rest of A Different Kind Of Truth, their first album with original vocalist David Lee Roth in 28 years, and it leaves me wondering if Van Halen haven't perpetrated the most dementedly genius, reverse psychology-thinking marketing strategy in music history by first purposely lowering fans' expectations drastically, only to knock them on their collective asses with an absolute monster of an album. Warning: this review may contain even more gushing than was used in my review of the latest Foo Fighters album.

Much has been made of the fact that Van Halen went back and "retooled" all of the songs on this album from material written in the 70s, a number of which appeared on the band's first professional demo recording produced by KISS' Gene Simmons (known in bootleg circles as the Zero album). This news initially made me raise an eyebrow and lose some respect for the band, as it seemed such a maneuver disappointingly indicated they were now creatively barren. After hearing the album, however, it now strikes me as a bold move from the group in an effort to recapture their classic sound, based on strong previously unreleased material. A Different Kind Of Truth feels like it was unearthed from a time capsule buried in the early 80s when Van Halen were in their prime, only the album sounds sonically superior than the technology allowed back then (it was produced by the band and John Shanks), delivering a colourful and decadent blast of fresh air to today's stodgy, bleak rock landscape. And although I was quite surprised to read it, I was impressed with Roth's honesty in admitting that the band long ago passed their creative peak, in terms of songwriting skills (read his interesting interviews with the L.A. Times here and with The Guardian here).

"Tattoo" is the album's lead track and although it's improved moderately after a few more listens, it's still easily A Different Kind Of Truth's weakest song, begging the question of what in the world Van Halen was thinking by designating it as the public's introduction to their big comeback album. The only other one of the album's 13 tracks that failed to really connect with me on the same level as the rest of the songs was "Stay Frosty", but even it's pretty decent. It acts as essentially a sequel to the band's classic "Ice Cream Man", emulating that song's bluesy acoustic guitar intro followed by a full band juke joint boogie (there's a lot of boogieing on this album, by the way).

To use a baseball metaphor, aside from those two tracks, the band steps up to the plate and belts one extra base hit after another, with most of them leaning toward the triple and home run side. "She's The Woman" harkens back to Fair Warning's "Mean Street" with its funky swing; in fact, the Zero version of "She's The Woman" includes the same mid-song breakdown the band later used on "Mean Street". Aside from a killer riff from guitarist Eddie Van Halen and some classic yelping Roth vocals, one of the aspects of the song that really grabbed me was drummer Alex Van Halen's high hat sound. Now, drum cymbal sounds might not be something that qualify as "sexy" to discuss in a review, but I was amazed at how bright and prominent in the mix they were, standing out even more because of the funky, crisp beat that Alex is laying down. "You And Your Blues" features one of the strongest song choruses on the album, combining some great background vocals with Roth lyrically referencing some Stones and Zeppelin song titles, and pushing his voice to the limit. "Blood And Fire" has a similar poppy mentality (it reminded me of Women And Children First's "Yours In A Simple Rhyme") and is rendered even more interesting because of some of the inspired creative choices by the band, such as the off-kilter rhythm pattern Alex briefly uses, as well as Roth's familiar "Now look at all of the people here tonight" line sung almost as a throwaway between the chorus and verse sections. At the other end of the spectrum are the album's heaviest songs: "China Town" begins with a short outer space guitar instrumental from Eddie that turns into a piledriving "Hot For Teacher"-style hard rock shuffle, the two-and-a-half minute "Bullet Head" shines in all areas except for a somewhat weak chorus, and the schizophrenic "As Is" feels like three songs in one. Its massive sounding tribal drum and heavy guitar intro took me back to the opening of "Everybody Wants Some!" from Women And Children First, before moving on to the toe tappin' main part of the song, with a stop for a brief bluesy mid-song breakdown along the way. Also adhering to the uptempo song style that dominates the album are "Honeybabysweetiedoll" (featuring one of Eddie's best solos on an album loaded with spectacular guitar pyrotechnics), the wah wah pedal-drenched "The Trouble With Never", and "Outta Space", known as "Let's Get Rockin'" on Zero and one of the best tracks here. The final two songs on the album are "Big River" (formerly "Big Trouble"), with a noticeable element of the fat, single note bass line from their debut album's "Runnin' With The Devil", and "Beats Workin'" (formerly "Put Out The Lights"), which features a simple main guitar riff that sounds like it could only have been conceived in the 70s. The riff is reminiscent of something Aerosmith or KISS might have also concocted circa 1975, but Eddie puts his stamp on it with his signature noodles and dive bomb effects.

It's a measure of how outstanding this album is that I still found myself seriously excited to go out and buy the CD (yes, I still buy those), even though I'd listened to the album about eight or nine times already since it leaked online last Thursday. A Different Kind Of Truth is the sound of a band determinedly returning to remind starved fans of why the early output in their career established them as one of the greatest American rock bands ever. The musicianship on all fronts is impeccably impressive; one of the best playing aspects relating specifically to the Van Halen brothers is how they both fill the space of a song with so many unique and tasteful choices. Eschewing the conventions of most musicians, it's those interesting changes and additional flourishes from verse to verse and chorus to chorus they make that really keep things interesting. "Muscular" is the best word I can think of to describe Eddie's playing - he hasn't sounded this engaged and downright hungry in decades now, making this album a guitar junkie's wet dream. Working in tandem with his uncle Alex's bombastic drumming is a surprisingly mature and first-class bass performance from Wolfgang Van Halen, who I assume is doing the playing and not his father (Eddie). Original bassist Michael Anthony is still missed, but Wolfie is more than up to the task. Then there's Roth, the project's wild card. I wondered if he, at age 56, would be able to recapture that legendary Diamond Dave swagger on record, and damned if he doesn't pick up where he left off on the 1984 album. There's plenty of lascivious slick talking in his guttural lowest voice, shrieks, yelps, tongue-tying wordplay, and other vocal shenanigans to be found here. Roth pulls it all off...including, you know, the actual singing parts.

You can rip the band for using refurbished decades-old material to prop them up, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is that Van Halen have produced a stellar album that emphatically continues the second "Roth era" while doing justice to the first. Other than Anthony's absence, frankly, I don't think a fan of the group could have expected a Van Halen-with-Roth reunion album to deliver anything much more satisfying than A Different Kind Of Truth.

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆

Tina Fey - Bossypants [book review]

Released in April 2011 and last month in paperback (part of an ongoing series of reviews covering older releases from the past year that "fell through the cracks")

Tina Fey's Bossypants was a runaway success upon its release last April, entrenching itself on the New York Times Best Seller list for months, which is where it returns after being released in paperback last month. Bossypants is partially an amusing memoir, surrounded by other humorous observations on show business and life, presented in a loose style that can find it, say, deviating off into a rundown of funny lists, and other such non sequiturs. At one point, she responds to some real messages from her Internet haters, including the one that called her an "ugly, pear-shaped, bitchy, over-rated troll" (she also actually uses that one as a blurb on the book's back cover). Men, don't dismiss this as a "chick book", because while she does occasionally discuss things like workplace sexism, female body image as shaped by Beyoncé and JLo, female empowerment, and balancing motherhood with a career, it's not overloaded with female-centric topics. Anyway, the bottom line is that funny is funny, and this is a veritable laugh fest from beginning to end. Fans of her brilliant TV show 30 Rock will find a comfortable familiarity in Fey's quirky, but still accessible comedic writing style; non-fans will still find plenty of humour in her sharp wit and perpetually entertaining musings.

Here's some of the funnier excerpts:

* On her first period: "I was ten. I had noticed something was weird earlier in the day, but I knew from commercials that one's menstrual period was a blue liquid that you poured like laundry detergent onto maxi pads to test their absorbency. This wasn't blue...so I ignored it for a few hours."

* On the scar on her cheek: "I've always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: 'Did a cat scratch you?' God bless. Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, 'Did they ever catch the black guy that did that to you?' Hmmm. It was not a black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was."

* On being Photoshopped on magazine covers: "I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society...unless I need it, in which case everybody be cool."

* On overworking herself: "By the way, when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life."

Fey covers her start in showbiz studying improv and sketch comedy with Chicago's Second City company, her ascent to becoming the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live (along with being an occasional sketch player and co-anchor of Weekend Update), and the struggles and hard work involved with creating, producing, writing, and starring in 30 Rock. Fey's SNL observations are, no surprise, the most interesting in the book. She deconstructs the whirlwind experience of playing Sarah Palin, a role which became a pop culture touchstone that many feel actually had an impact on the 2008 presidential election. On SNL's legendarily hectic week-of-show schedule she writes, "The show doesn't go on because it's ready, it goes on because it's 11:30". I was very curious to see how Fey would tackle the subject of SNL's notoriously institutionalized sexism, as she still has a business relationship with SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels (who exec produces 30 Rock), and still has many friends that work on the show. Her criticism is revelatory and actually not as diplomatically held back as I expected, such as when she cites a specific example that occurred during her first week on the show. Chris Kattan (a male) was chosen over female fellow cast member Cheri Oteri to play a female character in a sketch, of which Fey writes, "I remember thinking that was kind of bullshit...it illustrates how things were the first week I was there. By the time I left nine years later, that never would have happened. The women in the cast took over the show and I had the pleasure of being there to witness it".

Bossypants is a casual and easily digestible read, although Fey can get serious every now and then, such as her touching words about having a strong father figure, who she charmingly refers to by using his full name. She inevitably steers the periodically more thoughtful tone back in a comedic direction, though, writing, "You certainly aren't interested in the 'unresolved father issues' that rendered Bill Clinton unable to keep his fly closed. Don Fey is not going to put up with that. Don Fey is a grown-ass man! Black people find him stylish!". Clocking in at 277 pages, or five-and-a-half hours for the audiobook version (read by the author), Bossypants may be relatively slight as far as its word count, but it does have possibly the most laughs per page of any book I've ever read.

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆

Megadeth - Th1rt3en [album review]

Released in November 2011

Fun fact: Megadeth founding members Dave Mustaine (lead vocals and guitar) and Dave Ellefson (bass) are devout Christians, and Ellefson is even in the midst of studying to become a Lutheran minister (read about that here). God and Megadeth might seem like odd bedfellows...and they are. The band's lyrics tread regularly in topics from the distinctly darker side of life, their music is violent and raw, and their skeletal mascot Vic Rattlehead always graces the visually bleak artwork that accompanies every album. It's an intriguing contradiction, to be sure.

Ellefson surprisingly returned to the fold in 2010 after an eight year exodus that found him and the infamously difficult Mustaine estranged, with Ellefson even hitting Mustaine with a lawsuit over royalties. As a longtime Megadeth fan who cares about things such as how much of the original group is still intact, I hoped that Ellefson's returning presence would help to sustain the high level of quality the band hit with 2010's Endgame (read my review here), but they would appear to have taken a step back to the mediocre levels that plagued nearly all of their album output throughout the first decade of this century. Th1rt3en is (surprise) the speed metal pioneers' 13th studio album and was recorded under a fairly tight time constraint, leading the band to curiously revisit five arcane songs that had previously been released, albeit mostly in demo form and on relatively obscure recordings. The results are uneven.

"Sudden Death" solidly opens the album, immediately breaking out the guitar fireworks with some epic soloing for a good minute over a building intro before Mustaine's snarling vocals start in. His singing style makes, I believe, Megadeth one of those "love 'em or hate 'em" artists - like Dylan, Cohen, or Young, for example, it's not for everybody (did I just compare Dave Mustaine to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young?). "Public Enemy No. 1", the punkish "Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)", and "We The People" follow and are also strong, indicating that Th1rt3en might just give Endgame a run for its money. Alas, things then fall apart with the forgettable "Guns, Drugs & Money", before making a strong comeback with the scorching "Never Dead". The song is saddled with a pointless one minute instrumental intro before a chugging guitar riff breaks the tedium and then showcases Megadeth at their heaviest, pissed off best. "New World Order" follows and, while it's a good song, I'd already heard it (in slightly rougher form) on the CD single for "A Tout La Monde" 16 years ago. "Fast Lane" is one of the album's best songs, but the lyrics somewhat lazily revisit the "speed rush" theme heard most recently on Endgame's "1320". The final five songs on the album barely register, with slower, more stripped down numbers "Millennium Of The Blind" and "13" noticeably revealing Mustaine's vocal limitations. The nightmare-themed "Deadly Nightshade" is done no favours by its dopey title and an oddball intro featuring a girl giggling that has nothing seemingly to do with the rest of the song.

Megadeth, rounded out by guitarist Chris Broderick and drummer Shawn Drover, are second to none in the metal world when it comes to throwing down with their individual musical technical abilities, which this album has up the wazoo. The songwriting, however, just isn't there, resulting in a fairly disappointing and spotty effort.

Rating: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆