The fact that every song on the album was as strong as anything else in Van Halen’s catalog up to that point in time is also impressive. The showstoppers from a guitar perspective are Hot for Teacher, with its hot-rodded blues boogie shuffle, and Girl Gone Bad, featuring Van Halen’s signature harmonics, a dynamic progressive rock structure and a blazing solo filled with Allan Holdsworth–style legato runs. The pumping groove of Panama and the heavy-hitting House of Pain rocked as hard as anything the band had offered on its five previous albums, while Top Jimmy and Drop Dead Legs introduced entirely new territory that paved the way for the band’s next chapter.Įd’s dazzling guitar solos even elevated the keyboard-dominated songs Jump and I’ll Wait. While three of the album’s nine songs are dominated by synths, the entire album features some of Eddie Van Halen’s hottest and most impressive guitar playing ever. Music store keyboard departments were soon filled with the sounds of aspiring musicians playing ham-fisted versions of Jump, much the same way that guitar departments were subjected to novices attempting to play Stairway to Heaven.īut there is much more to 1984 than Jump, which incidentally was Van Halen’s first and only song to reach the Number One spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Almost overnight, sales of synthesizers increased exponentially, similar to the revolutionary boost in guitar sales that Van Halen influenced after the first Van Halen album made its debut, and fortuitously coinciding with the introduction of the first affordably priced polyphonic synths.
0 kommentar(er)
