17. Vandenberg Vandenberg 1982 (ATCO)
Hard Rock
Sleek, shiny and ready to romp up the charts.
Album
Vandenberg were a Dutch hard rock band named after their guitarist Ad ‘Adje’ van den Berg aka Adrian (following on from the likes of Montrose and Samson etc here) and legend has it that he once failed an audition for Thin Lizzy, which is a surprise given his guitar mastery! Anyway the band’s history mirrors that of so many other bands, in that the band’s various members had cut their chops with local smaller bands before coming together under the guise of Vandenberg (a very Dutch name btw) From the word go their sound would be an accomplished melodic hard rock that was heavily infused with some delicious AOR, and their debut would be distinctly aimed at the US market. The band also made their intentions felt, by touring as support in the US to bigger names like Ozzy Osbourne and a revitalised Kiss (who appear later in this year’s list) and in many ways their album should’ve made a much bigger splash than it actually did, given the band’s touring exposure and chart guaranteed sound. The album was recorded at Jimmy Page’s Sol Studios where the band issued a strong if not overly original collection of commercial twinkers. The album’s opening track “Your Love is in Vain” and the soon-to-be single “Burning Heart” are about as commercial as it gets here and could’ve been made by any number of similar 1980s heavy/AOR outfits. In fact “Burning Heart” would end up by being a big single for the band, where it cracked the US top 40 the following year. But the reason why this album is here, is for songs like “Back on My Feet” “Wait” and “Nothing to Lose” as all three are top drawer AOR/hard rock numbers built to last and being an AOR nut and just listening to them it’s like sex to my ears! Faster tracks like “Ready for You” are well placed to keep the tempo of the album ticking along nicely and parts of the neo-classical influenced “Too Late” sound like the obligatory Rob Halford track in places. The only genuine weak track on the album is the album closer “Out in the Streets” which sounds like a rapid re-run of a couple of album’s earlier tracks. Band vocalist Bert Heerink is a great vocalist, with that crisp yet powerful sound and his style very much pre-dates for example a vocalist like Timo Tolkki of Stratovarius by almost a decade and Adrian Vandenberg is a genuine axe-slinger of real talent and is unsurprisingly the star of the show here. As said earlier the album should’ve made a much bigger splash than it did, because with songs like “Burning Heart” which sounds like the quintessential power-ballad, a number of years before they became a semi-permanent feature of the US charts. The band were fully aware of what to deliver here and in this vein most of the album’s material also falls into the essential commercial addictive category as well. In fact I’ve read a number of reviews about this album and its detractors often state how the band’s influences can be heard from a mile off, but one thing is certain though and that anybody listening to the Vandenberg debut, will hear a whole load of familiar sounding tunes, that better known bands would be putting out in terms of style not too long after this album. In hindsight Vandenbergh seemed like commercial metal pioneers for the early 1980s US market and I guess if the album had come out a couple of years later, they probably would be as well remembered as the far better known Europe.