Balance (1995)
1. The Seventh Seal
2. Can't Stop Loving You
3. (Don't Tell Me) What Love Can Do
4. Amsterdam
5. Big Fat Money
6. Strung Out
7. Not Enough
8. Aftershock
9. Doin' Time
10.Baluchitherium
11.Take Me Back (Deja Vu)
12.Feelin'
When David Lee Roth exited after the release of 1984, I remember thinking that if he had stayed, the band would have been on a fast track to decline. Why? Hard to say exactly — it just felt like the whole Van Halen shtick had run its course. Whether by luck or design, the arrival of Sammy Hagar injected fresh life, and for a while, the machine ran smoothly. I bring this up because, unfortunately, the same “time for a change” feeling now applied to the Hagar era by the time this 1995 release rolled around. Truthfully, they probably should have bowed out after For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge in ’91.
By the mid-’90s, the ever-fickle public seemed ready to move on. A new Van Halen album didn’t inspire the same frenzy it had just four years earlier. Behind the scenes, the first cracks were forming between Eddie Van Halen and Hagar, and on the record, you can hear the decline in real time. The album starts strong — even great — but the further you get into the tracklist, the more it sounds like the band simply lost interest.
The opening trio — The Seventh Seal, Can’t Stop Loving You, and (Don’t Tell Me) What Love Can Do — are among the Hagar era’s finest. Yet only the second of these, buoyed by heavy airplay, managed to make any real dent in public consciousness. From there, it’s a swift drop. The fourth cut, Amsterdam — essentially a “pro-pot” anthem — is passable, and depressingly, it’s still leagues ahead of what follows.
The rest is a patchwork of filler: throwaway tracks, a couple of noise-laden instrumentals that serve no purpose, and, in a truly baffling move, a power ballad in Not Enough. Nothing inherently wrong with power ballads, but when you think Van Halen, this is the last thing you want bleeding out of the speakers.
What we’re left with is an uneven record that, combined with the sense that Van Halen’s glory days were behind them, stands as one of their weakest studio outings. And if the music was already shaky, the coming years would bring even more trouble. The real show was about to shift from the stage to the headlines, as infighting and personality clashes took center stage far more often than new songs.
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