Description
Re: 20-06-2025
Van Halen Taps into a Mean Streak on Fair Warning: The Darkest and Fiercest Album of the Band’s Career Includes “Unchained” and “So This Is Love?”
1981 Record Sounds Unrelenting on Mobile Fidelity’s UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP Box Set: Strictly Limited to 7,500 Copies, Audiophile Reissue Is Sourced from the Original Master Tapes and Pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl.
1/4″ / 30 IPS analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe
Witness the crazies, poor folks, and hunters of “Mean Street”; the former prom queen turned pornographic actress on “Dirty Movies”; the menace and vice of “Sinners Swing!”; the streetwise hustle of “Unchained”; the isolation and alienation of “Push Comes to Shove”; the desire for escape on “One Foot Out the Door”: A carefree California beach party Fair Warning is not.
Having said he felt angry and frustrated during the sessions, guitarist Eddie Van Halen uses the forceful arrangements as a playground for his seemingly unlimited arsenal. Supported by a crack rhythm section and a hyped-up Roth, he performs with an almost impossible combination of punk-like intensity, technical finesse, lyrical fluidity, and unbridled emotion. The virtuoso was increasingly butting heads with Templeton and seeking a freedom in the studio he believed denied him.
No wonder he plays like a bat out of hell. Listen to the rapid-fire manner in which he slaps the high and low E strings on the 12th fret of his instrument on “Mean Street,” instilling the tune with funk flair and metal-spiked sharpness. For the pouty strut of “Dirty Movies,” Eddie Van Halen contributes slide guitar magic made possible after he sawed off the lower portion of a Gibson SG so he could reach further down the fretboard.
Related intensity, urgency, and daredevil momentum punctuate the surging “Sinner’s Swing!” A heavily flanged, delicately melodic introduction frames the attitudinal “Hear About It Later,” among the most creative arrangements of Van Halen’s career. And do riffs come any bigger or magnetic than those on the high-wire kick of “Unchained”? As for the out-of-left-field “Sunday in the Park,” an instrumental composed on an Electro-Harmonix micro-synthesizer: Who but Eddie Van Halen to supply creep factor in such an ingenious way?
Tracklist:
Side One:
- Mean Street
- Dirty Movies
Side Two:
- Sinner’s Swing!
- Hear About It Later
Side Three:
- Unchained
- Push Comes To Shove
Side Four:
- So This Is Love?
- Sunday Afternoon In The Park
- One Foot Out The Door
