Official "A Different Kind of Truth" Album Review Thread

[Panamark]

ADKOT Kills Death Magnetic and I still hope for "the" Metallica comeback album....

Perspective/comeback wise ADKOT is on the level of Ozzy with Blizzard of Ozz..

[fryingdutchman]

ADKOT Kills Death Magnetic and I still hope for "the" Metallica comeback album....

Perspective/comeback wise ADKOT is on the level of Ozzy with Blizzard of Ozz..

Now THAT I agree with!!!

Congrats on baby Pana #2 by the way Markie!

[Panamark]

Now THAT I agree with!!!

Congrats on baby Pana #2 by the way Markie!

Thanks Bro, although Im still figuring out how to drive number one

[Beerdrinker]

Sorry, I am a little bit disappointed from the new Album.
Some very good ideas - especially from Ed-, but I think that the ideas doesn´t fit together.
Best example: "Beats Workin". Good start, but then....
I think too, that the lyrics (singing) are too high for Daves voice in most of the songs...

"You and your blues" is the only song for me .... and the last seconds from "Tattoo", (starting from 04:15)

[Roy Munson]

Sorry, I am a little bit disappointed from the new Album.
Some very good ideas - especially from Ed-, but I think that the ideas doesn´t fit together.
Best example: "Beats Workin". Good start, but then....
I think too, that the lyrics (singing) are too high for Daves voice in most of the songs...

"You and your blues" is the only song for me .... and the last seconds from "Tattoo", (starting from 04:15)

You're a fucking idiot.

[fryingdutchman]

Sorry, I am a little bit disappointed from the new Album.
Some very good ideas - especially from Ed-, but I think that the ideas doesn´t fit together.
Best example: "Beats Workin". Good start, but then....
I think too, that the lyrics (singing) are too high for Daves voice in most of the songs...

"You and your blues" is the only song for me .... and the last seconds from "Tattoo", (starting from 04:15)

Really dude? You must have overdosed on Hasselhoff over there in Germany....

Apparently Natra is the only German here with taste.

Dirk...tune this bitch up.

[fryingdutchman]

Thanks Bro, although Im still figuring out how to drive number one

It gets easier the second time 'round...

[Angel]

Perhaps it's because I'm in academia mode, and constantly critically thinking, but this album is SO deep. Last year, I forgot to turn my phone off for an English class. Just happened that day we were talking about some lyricists being poets, and the difference between the two when all of a sudden RWTD is "blasting" at my desk. I catch it quick and my prof asks "who was that". I tell him, and he quotes some lyrics from "Jump", and says yeah, that's lyrics, not poetry.

That's not the case with this album. I haven't had a chance yet to read the lyrics, so I keep catching different things. I can't wait to print out that pdf and sit down and do a thorough analysis on the lyrics in this album, it's so freaking rich with symbolism! "Do you really have to drive that way, just to piss me off". I see Dave meandering down a country road in his pick up truck with his dogs, and some fucking yahoo comes screaming past him (on the double solid line); Dave looks over as the idiot screams by and there's this red-headed clown in a yellow shirt, tequila bottle in hand...and Dave thinks to himself, "eat a bullet till your crazy dead", asshole. And "Your Blues"? Can't even START on that sucker with a cursory glance. There's SO many layers in that one, one could be "unpacking" it for months on end. Hell, this album is worthy of a fucking thesis!

Speaking of which, imagine what an anthropologist could do with THIS site? We really are a society unto ourselves... Hell, I might suggest it to the Anthropology department.

Okay, obviously I AM in academia mode; time to go write papers.

[BenJammin]

Well I'm not a sophisticated audiophile, I just know when I'm enjoying something because of the big grin on my face!

My wife and kids (probably neighbors too ) thought I was crazy last night because I listened to [blasted actually
] the album in the garage probably 6 times thru last night !

So I'm gonna go off on a little self-indulgent tangent here about what this means to me in a life changing way...

It's all so unreal to me after all these years. I had just joined the navy in 1984 when THAT album came out, and of course we know what followed so this is definately a time for celebration.

I tried to stick with VH into the Hagar years, even enjoying 5150 to a point because it was the only thing we had to hold onto. My interest dropped off after that and I think in the back of my mind I've just been waiting for this. Side note, I realize more than ever now what shit lyrics Sammy wrote and what a big douche he is, especially some of the things he's been saying about this release while simultaneously trying to promote his benign Chickcrap-crap.

I'll be 48 years old this summer. I'm starting to feel my age and think I'm slowing down, falling behind the younger people at work, becoming irrelevant, fading into my eventual mortality, etc, etc. (sad idn't it, lol ! )

Now here, the fact that these guys can come together despite all the crap of the past and make what I think will be a landmark album that rules over just anything currently out there speaks volumes and is an inspiration to me.

As we all know they are in their fifties with Dave and Alex pushing 60, so that tells me to quit whining about getting older and get off my ass because I still got a lot of life to live !


Thanks Wolfgang.

[Luke D]

Chuck Klosterman wrote an interesting piece for Grantland.com where, as a fan, he makes an honest judgement:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7561092/judging-new-van-halen-album-different-kind-truth

Medium Awesome: The Return of Van Halen
Sifting through the confusion about the rock legends' new album
By Chuck Klosterman on February 10, 2012

When I saw Van Halen at Café Wha? in January, I was operating from a position of accidental enthusiasm. I didn't think I was even going to a concert, to be honest; I halfway expected to show up at the venue and find myself sitting through a press conference punctuated by an acoustic rendition of "Me Wise Magic" (or something of that order). But then I realized the band was going to play for real, with actual amps and electricity, in a claustrophobic basement. I got excited. And then they played, and then I got really excited. And then I went home and immediately wrote a 2,000-word review, and then I woke up the next day and realized the review I'd written made absolutely no linear sense, so then I immediately wrote another one, this time with my corpus callosum intact. And then (AND THEN) I kind of stopped thinking about the show entirely. I stopped thinking about the future of the band, or the fact that they were releasing a new album in February. Instead, I spent two weeks listening to old Van Halen albums and returned to my life. I started to wonder if maybe I'd spent more time worrying about Van Halen than any reasonable man should, and if maybe I'd written more sentences about Van Halen than any member of society could possibly need. I thought to myself, Maybe I should just quietly enjoy this music. Maybe this should become an interior process. But then it occurred to me that it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend my life writing about things I don't understand when there are things I actually do know about, which obviously includes Van Halen albums.

So ... A Different Kind of Truth.

It's a record, man.

Let me open by saying that this is not a good name for an album. (It's not a terrible name, but worse than a simple number or a series of numbers and not much better than a combination of numbers and capital letters.) I should also add that I've read many reviews of this album and I agree with most of them; in other words, I think this album is better than I expected (and certainly better than most reunion efforts), but not as strong as any of the old Van Halen records I traditionally adore. A Different Kind of Truth is really two EPs: Five (or maybe 5 ½) songs reworked from 1976, and eight (or maybe 7 ½) songs that are new creations. The conventional wisdom suggests the '76 songs are awesome and the new songs are adequate, and this (of course) is roughly true. What's most surprising about the fresh songs is how reminiscent they are of David Lee Roth's solo career: "Blood and Fire" and (the excellent) "You and Your Blues" really belong on 1988's Skyscraper. "As Is" has an Eat'em and Smile vibe (even the guitar playing). "Tattoo" feels like the third single off A Little Ain't Enough, and "Stay Frosty" is uncomfortably close to 1998's DLR Band. I'm not sure how this happened; it's entirely possible that Roth has more musical ideas (and more force of personality) than most people give him credit for.

I realize everyone wants to compare and contrast A Different Kind of Truth to the rest of VH's catalog,1 but that's the wrong prism to employ. The two better metrics are literal (i.e., how the old songs compare to their original incarnations) and hypothetical (i.e., how the new songs compare with whatever one imagined they had the potential to be). First, the old stuff: The tracks sound good, but not as good as the '76 demos. This is not because the band got worse; in most ways, they got better. But modern albums don't sound the way they did in 1976, and particularly not recordings that were produced as cheaply as that 10-track demo. The most crucial aspect of Van Halen — more than the virtuosity or the attitude or the cocaine — is Eddie Van Halen's guitar tone. It's the most jarringly singular post-Hendrix guitar tone anyone has ever produced (EVH calls this the "brown sound," which never seemed accurate to me ... but it's his sound to name). The finest Eddie Van Halen tones are found on 1978's Van Halen, 1979's Van Halen II, and those '76 demos (now referred to as "Van Halen Zero" in bootleg circles). The fact that he can still shred is secondary. Rolling Stone critic and Grantland contributor Jon Dolan once told me that the core problem with Eddie Van Halen was that his solos were "way too Astroturf," and I begrudgingly understand what he means — at times, there is an inflexible, synthetic aftertaste to all the finger-tapping and pinballing. Either by accident or on purpose, Eddie galvanized the universal belief in metal circles that playing fast was the only way to prove you were playing well (a collective assumption that lasted from the summer of '79 until the advent of Slash). Sometimes his competence is repetitive. But his leads are almost always propulsive, and you can't really criticize his tone; the only thing you can say is that sometimes that tone is better and sometimes that tone is worse. And it was better in '76 (at least to me). It was better when it was analog. I also find the group's decision to change the lyrics on those old songs a little ridiculous. Why turn a song called "Big Trouble" into "Big River"? What is the purpose of twisting the phrase "Put Out the Lights" into "Beats Workin'"? Such adjustments aren't a crime (obviously), and the band can do whatever they want (obviously). But it's clearly not fooling anyone, and it raises a lot of unnecessary questions. For example, they did not change the title of "She's the Woman". Is this because that particular message is somehow more meaningful, or is it because the phrase "She's the Phantom" never occurred to anyone in the studio?

Still, it must be said: These are competitive songs. They're loose, effortlessly heavy, and better than anything the band has made since "Cabo Wabo." I suppose some will argue it's cheating to rely on old stuff, but that makes no sense. Is there anyone on the planet who feels Eddie Van Halen isn't inventive enough? This is not something that needs validation.

Which brings us to the new stuff.

It's not great. That doesn't mean it's awful or humiliating or anything to get upset about — it just means that none of this new material is within the airspace of "Panama." It's not MJ with the White Sox, but it's MJ with the Wizards at the end of a six-game road trip. The playing is tight, because Van Halen would never release an album that wasn't hyper-professional. But a song like "Honeybabysweetiedoll" is just overstuffed with notes. It's more impressive than enjoyable. This is my theory: When Sammy Hagar wrote his autobiography and described Eddie and Alex Van Halen as broken, booze-filled corpses (he compared EVH's home with Valerie Bertinelli to the mansion from Grey Gardens), it motivated Eddie to get clean and re-crush society. The power of spite fueled his desire to prove he was still Godzilla. And — to his credit — he does seem totally recovered. The intro on "China Town" is like a condensed, economical version of the opening to "Mean Streets." So why don't I like it more than I do? Probably because it actually is what it sounds like — a condensed, economical, conscious replication of something that used to be an organic extension of his genius. It's no one's fault. Eventually, everyone becomes who they always were.

As for the rest of the group: Wolfie Van Halen gets an "A" and Alex Van Halen gets an
"A-," but only because we're grading on a curve and AVH has never performed poorly on any song I've ever heard. Roth's effort is tougher to quantify. Whenever you write about Dave, there's always an unspoken responsibility to note his "limitations as a vocalist," but that misses the point. That's an issue for American Idol. Gary Cherone had very few "vocal limitations," and nobody in North America likes Van Halen III. Nobody likes John Corabi more than Vince Neil or Steelheart more than Hole or Stick It To Ya more than Powerage. Roth sounds the way the singer from Van Halen is supposed to sound, so he only competes with himself. He is, as we're all well aware, exceptionally adroit at talking over the breakdown. Sometimes he can be self-indulgent, although that's kind of like accusing Newt Gingrich of being too political. To a degree, Dave gets a lifetime pass just for proving that humans like himself can exist in reality. The only way he could ruin a Van Halen album would be by not participating.

I'll be as straightforward as I possibly can: I don't know what I'm trying to express here. My feelings are mixed to the point of being meshed. Going into A Different Kind of Truth, I unconsciously suspected my takeaway would be, "This is a bad album, but I love it nonetheless." My actual sentiment is closer to, "This is a good album, but I just don't like it, no matter how much I try." And I'm disappointed in myself for feeling that way, somehow, which only proves that the things I understand most will always confuse me forever.

[Sensible Shoes]

But a song like "Honeybabysweetiedoll" is just overstuffed with notes.

Reminds me of a line from the movie "Amadeus" where the Dutch king (or whatever he is) tells Mozart that the piece he's commissioned is OK but it has "too many notes".

[Luke D]

I think using the metaphor "it's MJ with the Wizards at the end of a six-game road trip" is a bit harsh.

[Beerdrinker]

Really dude? You must have overdosed on Hasselhoff over there in Germany....

Apparently Natra is the only German here with taste.

Dirk...tune this bitch up.

eat your burger and fuck your fat american bitch. For more you are not good

[Va Beach VH Fan]

[Jérôme Frenchise]

Well, I got my copy of ADKOT on Wednesday 8th, whereas Amazon had announced the 6th, but due to the fucking freeze, I suppose,
I received it 2 days late. Anyway...

Before it came out, and for months, I had feared of being disappointed with the album, and it eventually amazed me.
ADKOT can easily be shelved right next to or under (depends on how you keep your CDs) 1984, IMO. There's some continuity.
The sound is huge and clear music is hyperexciting, fun, brilliant, ballsy, and so are Dave's lyrics - I count his voice as part of the music.
The proverbial virtuosity is here, immaculate!
It's more than I expected for them to do at best, and it feels awesome!

‘Tattoo’ : Still great to listen to, despite I overplayed it throughout January. It's so solid a tune, Dave's story and words kick ass! Who would have guessed the rest of the album would be so heavy, though?
I really dig the high-low loop in the end of Eddie's solo. Dave's vocals sound damn great.

‘She’s the Woman’ : I wasn't convinced that reworking the "Zero" tunes was such a good idea, but I changed my mind as soon as my CD player started track 02. I loved the 1977 Simmons produced version, but this one was worth being done! The slight changes in the vocal placements are pertinent, make the song even more percussive.
Ah, and that funk-hard rock riff, the tight, powerful interaction guitar/bass/drums...

‘You and Your Blues’ : They could have used this track instead of 'Tattoo' as the first single - but I dig 'Tattoo' just as much. Dave really sings his lungs out - "Everybody suffers.........".

‘China Town’ : the tune starts tremendously with Ed playing the incredible intro... The riff and bass/drums are awesome... Playing it live is a real challenge. It's my least fave track on the album, I confess, because of the pre-chorus and chorus, the only moments I don't really like.

‘Blood and Fire’ : Beautiful intro - then the verse made me first think of a Men at Work tune... Before the chorus explosion, "Ooooh YYYYEEEEEAAAAAAH"... A classic one, already, but almost every track is too.

‘Bullethead’ : Their Sabbath side is in there, but of course at VH speed and flamboyance - b-b-b-b-ballsy!!!

‘As Is’ : one of my top fave in the album - Al's "1-2-3-4", the insane riff and vocals, 'Hot For Teacher' 's little brother. I'm fond of this one. Ed's solo, the break and the outro are HUGE!! Full of ideas, just like CVH, and most of the album is.

‘Honeybabysweetiedoll’ : another one of my top fave tunes - the opening sounds, kind of mad, and the Indian-like, tremendous riff following... Dave's voice with the backing of Ed's and Wolf's... Top stuff, from the Top Band... Nothing Could sound more kickass IMO. Nothing but WOW!!!

‘The Trouble With Never’ : The intro and riff kick fucking ass, the tune is killer too. The chorus is more "classic" - but I'm no fan of chorusses. Ed's solo is another killer - but he delivered nothing else than killers on this record. The break is brilliant, the calm part with Dave singing very low, then the riff towards the chorus, the outro till the clear stop... Fucking great!

‘Outta Space’ : My second least fave of the album - bu I dig it anyway, just a little less than the other tracks -, this one delivers too, Wolf is amazing, Ed riffs like hell, the band is tight - but well, I'll surely dig this one as much in a few weeks.

‘Stay Frosty’ : one of, if not my top fave tunes, this one is an immediate classic! There's everything in there, the sound, the riffs, the story, the huge solo and outro... Already legendary!

‘Big River’ : Ah... The beat, the riff - funk-hard-rock like they used to play in the early days - Dave's vocals are huge there too... The solo and bridge before the last chorus are stellar! One of my top faves.

‘Beats Workin” : another of my top fave tunes - makes me think of 'In a simple rhyme' a lot - the riff is just awesomely-fuckin' excitingly brilliant!! Dave sounds even more at his best here IMO. What a kickass sound... The bridge before the last chorus, and then the last chorus, how Ed fills the gaps and... PLAYS!! Tremendous!!

Throughout the record there's everything I dig in VH: their why-just-play-it-let's-put-everything-we-can approach, invention, virtuosity, fun, balls, drive...
They managed to produce genuinely new stuff with a some partially old stuff, without self-parody. It's a real feat, I don't think they could have done any better than this.
The best gift they could offer their fans, for sure.

'A Different Kind Of Truth' I am gladly a believer of. :D