Unknown Soldier

Album
Fair Warning in many ways the find of the year for me, of course it’s an album I’d heard numerous times over the years, but it was an album that always failed to ignite any real excitement in me, so why the sudden change of heart? Well a number of metal listeners have often stated to me just what a treasure this album is in the Van Halen discography and if the competition hadn’t been so hot, it would certainly be an album worthy of a ‘top 10’ position or thereabouts. Van Halen on their first two albums Van Halen and Van Halen II had seen them lay down the yardstick of what defined American heavy metal at this time. But it was on their third album Women and Children First, where the band began to really challenge their early commercial flavoured metal sound with its flamboyant party feel, with a more serious sounding brand of metal. Sure from the word go Eddie Van Halen had orchestrated what metal riffs should be all about, but the music of the band often contained humorous overtones largely due to David Lee Roth’s vocal style, but on Women and Children First, the band had now challenged their own metal ethos with an album that was their heaviest to date. This album had contained both elements of speed metal and proto-thrash that were all set within a darker context, but in all this they still managed to keep the Van Halen flair of the first two albums fully intact (see reviews for these first three albums) So by the time of Fair Warning the band were now looking to push the envelope out even further and here we have probably the band’s boldest ever statement as a band. Album opener “Mean Street” has that typical VH sound and is a heavy grinding opener with the colossal riffs of Eddie Van Halen present, but on previous albums where a song like this would’ve been highlighted by the band’s party tendencies, this song now remains gritty from start to finish and doesn’t give into commercial overtones and this style continues in the same vein on the second track “Dirty Movies” which has some great drumming by Alex Van Halen. There is still plenty of humour around the place as well and it can be found on tracks like “Sinner’s Swing!” and “Unchained” and this second song also happens to be both the most melodic but yet grittiest track on the album! The most interesting track on the album is probably the dark disco overtones of “Push Comes to Shove” and then there is the surprise of “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” an instrumental with murky synths, and this leads into the gooey album closer “One Foot Out the Door”. At just 31 minutes this is Van Halen without commercial niceties, without obvious singles and without their typical humour, and what humour that can be found is most definitely wrapped up in a grinding heavy blanket of metal. Much like the previous Women and Children First album, I wouldn’t call Fair Warning a classic album as such, but its probably the most experimental and certainly the darkest release form the David Lee Roth era of the band.

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