What I'm Listening To

Chickenfoot - Chickenfoot (2009)
What do you do when the band that was at its most creative while you were the frontman decides to go on tour with their original clown of a lead singer? Why, you take their bass player and start your own version of the band, which is exactly what Sammy Hagar has done with Chickenfoot. It's pretty much Van Halen, ver. 2.5, as it features the non-Van Halen half of the second iteration of Van Halen, as well as Chad Smith, the Will Ferrell-lookalike drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and guitar genius Joe Satriani. When I pressed play on this record, I was disappointed with the first track, as it's a pretty bad song, and Sammy's voice just wasn't sounding right, and the guitar work was fairly pedestrian, and it's just not good. I was so set to be disappointed with the rest of the record. But on the second track, Sammy starts to sound like Sammy again, and the Michael Anthony backing vocals kick in, and Joe starts to shred a little, and suddenly I'm listening to the best Van Halen-less Van Halen record ever. The key to this whole venture is Satriani. Like most shred guitarists who came up in the '80s, Satriani's style is heavily informed by Eddie Van Halen's. But, unlike a lot of those same guitarists, Satriani has actually gotten better than Van Halen. And, while Eddie is still working on those tired licks from a body of work that stops 10 years ago, Satriani is still writing music and still getting better. Eddie needs to realize that the two-handed tapping, the dive bombs, the staccato harmonics: all that was revolutionary 25 years ago, but eight year old kids can play that shit now. And guys like Satriani and his assorted disciples have all passed him by. The old Van Halen is dead; long live the New Halen!

Daughtry - Leave This Town (2009)
To paraphrase a Herman's Hermits song: "Second verse, same as the first." It's nice to see that Daughtry appears to be an actual band that writes its own songs, and not just a bunch of studio musicians with a Svengali like Max Martin doing all the hard work. Good for them. Aaaaaaaand I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I like this album.

Assorted Michael Jackson cuts
Because everyone in the world has busted out Thriller in the past two weeks and rediscovered why it's the best-selling album of all time. Although, on retrospect, I will say that Eddie Van Halen's solo in "Beat It" is one of the most slapdash pieces of shit I've ever heard. I'd say it was pieced together with Pro Tools, but that didn't exist back then, so it actually IS that shitty; talk about phoning it in.

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath & Paranoid (both 1970)
Even though no one in the band has died (that I know of), I felt the urge to bust out the old Black Sabbath records. Nothing new to report here, as both these albums are older than I am, except that, for being a crusty British white guy, Bill Ward was a pretty funky drummer.

Boston - Boston (1976)
Sometimes, I get going on the crackpipe and decide to listen to something I had really never considered listening to. This week, it was Boston's debut album. This is one of the few albums I can think of that every man, woman, and child has heard every cut off of. (Thriller, oddly enough, is another.) And while, in the '90s, I would have considered this album "gay," it's really not that bad; it's aged much better than a lot of the music from the '90s. Hell, if it's good enough for Kurt Cobain to steal the riff for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from, then it's good enough for me.

Oasis - (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)
Even though they never got as big in the States as they did in the U.K., Oasis is still a pretty good band, despite the obvious Beatles comparisons. And this album is their most-consitently entertaining.

The History of Howard Stern
Sirius has been airing this while Stern has been on vacation. It's great to hear all the old stuff that not only made Stern into the monumental figure he is now, but wrote the playbook for every radio host from there on out. The work of true genius.

If I listen to anything else listenalbe, I'll let you know.