Ranking the Classic Pink Floyd & Van Halen Albums, Pt. 2

Now we get to the god stuff. These are all just incredible albums from start to finish, with the top ranking among the best I have ever listened to.

Tier IV - The True Classics

5.) Fair Warning

It’s commonly known as Van Halen’s dark album, one that has a more serious, dour, depressed tone. I get that to some degree. There are some pretty ‘dark’ songs, at least in relation to the rest of their albums. The darkest might be Push Comes to Shove, which is slow and plodding and perfectly rocking. Eddie's solo on that may be my most underrated favorite of his. The other dark song might be their most technically impressive on the album in Mean Streets, which has a fiery string of tapping at the start. But really, the album just rocks, really really loud and hard. Forget the darkness and the moodiness, it was all around brilliant.

The album contains the brownest of brown sounds from Eddie and the band. The masterpiece in this case was Unchained, a wall of brown sound that has become pretty instrumental in their success in the mid-80's. The sound was so pure, so riotous, so joyous. Similarly great sound quality emanates throughout the album, from Dirty Movies (a perfect Roth-era song lyrically), to Hear About it Later (still not sure how Eddie did what he does in the beginning), to Sinner's Swing. The album was full of incredibly tight, dark, dense songs, an apex of the Roth-era VH. 

The album ironically sold the least of any Roth-era albums, but it has captured a place in rock history. The album is a favorite among many VH fans and rock historians, a common choice for their best album overall. I, obviously, disagree as I have two more VH albums to come, but Fair Warning was a great period piece in Van Halen's development. It continued the growth they showed with Women and Children First, but a homage to their first two albums with the tightness of the songs. Fair Warning was not their masterpiece, but apart from their debut, no album better showcased what made Van Halen great.

4.) Women and Children First

I can easily flip this and Fair Warning, but Women and Children First gets a little more love from me because it was just a teensy bit more playful and more varied in style. While Fair Warning turned dark and heavy, Women and Children First played all over the map. It was such a fun album, going into standard rock, to jazz, to hardcore blues, to bluegrass, to metal. This was Van Halen at their greatest and most creative. It wasn't as momentous as the one VH album left, but it was as mature and in command as the band ever got. Plus, it has my favorite Van Halen song on it.

Romeo Delight is its name. To me, no song encapsulates everything that is great about Van Halen as this. Ironically, it doesn't feature a memorable solo from Eddie, but has everything else. Alex is great on the track on the drums. Mikey gets some great vocals in and has some of his best bass playing. Dave is brilliantly traipsing lyrics. The song itself is a not-so-well veiled ode to sex, partying and all-around having a good time. Eddie's guitar may not have a great solo, but it is so wild, so vibrant, so pouncing and joyous.

The rest of the album is nearly as great. Fools is probably the most Zeppelin-esque Van Halen ever got, while Loss of Control was their take on metal, just reduced to 2-and-a-half perfect minutes. This Could Be Magic let Eddie break out the acoustic and Dave slow down to a tee for a Soutehrn spiritual. The album was Van Halen in total command of what their band, their talent, their music was all about.

3.) Wish You Were Here

There might have been a lot of pressure on the band following Dark Side of the Moon. Somehow, someway, Pink Floyd came close. Maybe it wasn't as good as Dark Side of the Moon, but Wish You Were Here was a truly phenomenal album. It wasn't a pure concept album, it didn't have a consistent theme. It bounced around from Roger Watters disallusion to fame, to the band's general disallusion with the music industry's capitalism, to remembering the legacy of their old band mate Syd Barrett. The two-part epic that starts and ends the album in Shine On You Crazy Diamond is the headliner, but even the three songs that make up the meat in the sandwhich are great in their own right.

The two 'short' songs are the ones that will last with me. Have a Cigar is such a brilliantly written piece, so full of hilarious contempt and derision, with caustic sarcasm at the state of the music industry. Add to that the musical quality Floyd always possesses and it was an incredible short piece. Wish You Were Here (the song) was just the opposite. A haunting intro, a slight guitar riff, great background mystery from Rick Wright. The lyrics wrapped in metaphor after metaphor, a stark contrast to the rest of the album which is pretty open on its subjects. That two-parter is about as good as Pink Floyd gets (aside from Dark Side), a show of their hard rock musicality and then a show of their absolute brilliance in taking things slow.

Shine On is the masterpiece though. For an homage to Syd Barrett, it is so unlike the music he led Floyd into, but it doesn't matter. Musically, it was perfect, with sweeping melodies, brilliant harmonies, great keyboard from Wright, great riffs from Gilmour, and of course perfect vocals. The piece may drag at times, but Floyd's noodling in the slow moments makes it all better. Wish You Were Here was a perfect follow-up to Floyd's masterpiece, and taken in isolating it is pretty flawless by itself as well.

Tier V - The Legends

2.) Van Halen

There's many "I wish I was there" moments that I've had with rock music, but few would top "I wish I was there when Van Halen came out." The year was 1978. Disco ruled the music landscape. If I lived in Southern California and was between 17-25 there is a likelihood I knew of them already, but if I was in any other part of the country, the first album would have been my entry point... and my God was it an entry point. The album is Guitar brilliance from start to finish. Obviously, Ed's virtuoso performance is all-encompassing, but more than anything for me it was that tone, that beautiful meaty sound his guitar made, that was the throughline through the album. It starts off with what is not my favorite song, in 'Running with the Devil', but it was a good opener. But what came next changed rock music.

I first heard Eruption probably sometime in the mid-2000s, and even then, it changed my entire understanding of the guitar. I too was dumbfounded as to how this man could do THAT. It's been copied and played out by so many, but the original, uncut, version is still pure bliss. The rest of the album really doesn't contain one bad song in it. You get a perfectly Van Halen-ized cover of 'You Really Got Me', a shot-out to their days of rocking cover-songs as the best summer party band in LA. You get incredible guitar work multiple times over in 'Atomic Punk', or 'Little Dreamer', or 'On Fire.' You even get a change of pace with 'Ice Cream Man' that lets Dave have fun.

Every song on the track is memorable. You had the great intro riff in 'Ain't Talking Bout Love', or the soothing sexual tension of 'Jamie's Crying' and 'Feel Your Love Tonight', to the ridiculous pace of 'I'm The One' and 'On Fire.' Eddie's brilliance is pervasive, but so is Roth's energy and flair, Alex's solid drumming, and Michael Anthony's bass (more present than maybe it would ever be) and brilliant secondary harmonic vocals. Van Halen debuted with a masterpiece of a record, one that changed the focus of rock music back to American Hard Rock. It opened the eyes of many of rock music's great guitarists to come. It gave Eruption to the world. It belongs squarely in the pantheon of the all time great, singularly important, albums of all time.

1.) Dark Side of the Moon