No great rock band is perfect, no doubt about it. Of course, they mostly release great albums, but amongst the discography titans lies some downright duds that either have one good song on them, or none at all. And what really makes them worse is the poor choice of album artwork, just to add injury to insult. People are still willing to fork out money to buy these albums, but of course, this is purely to elevate their status as a fan, not because the album compels them to jump up and down on their couches playing the air guitar with the apartment window wide open, so everyone in the real world can see them embarrass themselves.
Van Halen is one of those great rock bands, and is also one of my all time favorite and most inspirational bands, I'll make this quite clear. Albums like Van Halen, 1984 and 5150 are favored highly by both me and many music publications, for good reason. You have Eddie Van Halen, the legendary guitar hero who's dexterity and prowess with an ax wears the fretboard down faster than a woodpecker on speed. And you can't leave frontmen Diamond Dave and Sammy Hagar out of the picture either. Coming back to what I've said in the first paragraph, not all great bands consistently put out great albums. And Van Halen's Fair Warning from 1981 is an example of this. For starters, the album cover is a painting by Canadian artist William Kurelek, called, "The Maze." On a wall in an art gallery this might look good, but on an album cover it looks ghastly, like a homely-looking lunch lady from Romania with moles sprouting whiskers and teeth like a row of broken menhirs. And the layout artist could've chosen better typography for the band name too. Oh, and the rest of the album cover is poo brown, which looks really bad, even for 1981. Musically, things aren't quite as bad, but they could've been much better too, every song except for "Unchained" and possibly "One Foot Out the Door" are by Van Halen standards boring. Listen to this album once, and put it away, I say. B-
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