If you’ve played guitar somewhat regularly at any point in your life you’ve 100% got Eddie Van Halen’s solo from “Eruption” saved somewhere on a guitar inspiration playlist somewhere. So when I remembered that his song Wolfgang had a band of his own it dawned on me I hadn’t given his debut album a full spin since it was released a few years ago and needed to get my ass on it.
Mammoth WVH is far from the genre-bending-rock-and-roll-history-in-the-making guitar hero glory of Van Halen’s debut album (an impossible standard to be fair) but it is a really solid hard rock album that is radio-ready from the onset. The mix sounds impeccable, the guitars are massive, the vocals have hooks aplenty, and it’s just simply a damn good album to pop in while you’re cruising down the highway at 70 miles an hour. Is it butt rock adjacent in the vein of Nickelback and Creed? Most certainly. But as we’ve discussed before when writing about Creed’s Human Clay and Nickelback’s All The Right Reasons, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Standout Songs: “Epiphany”, “Don’t Back Down”, “Distance”
