More little record reviews. I hope I’m not repeating myself.

♦Never The Bride: I bought this record after hearing the band’s amazing version of “Goin’ to California” on Encomium, a Led Zeppelin tribute album. I know very little about them, other than the fact that they’ve got a vocalist with an amazing female rock voice; a voice, that sadly ought to be out front on songs with more aggressive, rockin’ arrangement than you’ll find on this particular record. I get the impression that in a live setting, this band will make you beg for mercy (assuming you stop yourself from dancing), but the production here is really understated: lots of twinkly piano and arpeggiated acoustic guitars. I get the feeling that the major label producers stifled some of the rawness to attempt to make things more “marketable.” There’s some nice songwriting here, and some pretty nice guitar playing, though it gets lost in the mix for me. Leading off the record is the really strong “Saving Grace,” and “Cry Out” is a really great song, though it’s got some really trite “cheer up” lyrics over some interesting minor chords – kind of distracting.

♦ Barenaked Ladies: Born on A Pirate Ship: Maybe You Should Drive is probably my favorite BNL record, though this one maintains a lot of the same sort of energy the band had in the mid-nineties. They’d broadened their songwriting horizons a bit since the whimsy of Gordon, writing some really interesting dark, sad, literate lyrics over some intricate, poppy melodies (the dichotomy of which works exactly the way the song mentioned in the previous review doesn’t), but still keeping the quirk that caught my attention early on, without totally giving over to it as it feels like they did once they hit it big a few years after this. Standouts include “When I Fall”, “The Old Apartment” (the first real US hit), and the throat-tearing vocals on “Break Your Heart.” My favorite track though, is “Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank,” which has some great Jim Creegan string playing and the unlikely subject of some guy who stalked Anne Murray. Also, I saw the band on this tour, in a relatively tiny dive in Philly; they were still unknown enough at that point that we got to hang around with the band post-show and shoot the bull for really quite a long while. It was very cool.

♦ Def Leppard: Retro-Active: Rather than a “greatest hits” package, this is a collection of rarities and B-sides recorded between 1984 and 1993. While never a superfan of Def Leppard, I always enjoyed their stuff, as it was always more complex and better crafted instrumentally than most of their “hair metal” peers. I still own a cassette copy of Hysteria, but I doubt it works anymore, as I played it so much. There’s some really good stuff on here (most of the B-sides from the Hysteria and Adrenalize sessions), and some interesting, against type stuff; like a “From the Inside,” a little acoustic track with the Irish band Hothouse Flowers backing them up. It also has the first recorded Def Leppard tracks with Vivian Campbell (there he is again) in the band. It’s not as tight as Hysteria, but it’s a good and worthy listening experience.

♦ Van Halen: Van Halen 3: The first time Van Halen switched singers, fandom was divided, though many eventually accepted Sammy Hagar as a worthy, if somewhat different, replacement for David Lee Roth. When Sammy was fired/driven out/quit to sell tequila, and the band eventually got around to finding a replacement in Gary Cherone from Extreme, however, the resulting record was almost universally hated. That said, there really is, IMHO, some really good stuff on that record – the first seven tracks are really quite good, though it really does start to get excessively noodly and unfocused after “Fire In The Hole,” and stays that way all the way through “How Many Say I,” the overly indulgent and not very good piano ballad featuring Eddie on lead vocals. That front half of the record, particularly on stuff tunes like “Without You”, is pretty good, especially when the instrumentation tends more toward Cherone’s vocal style (i.e. when the band sounds more like Extreme than Van Halen). Given the general internal turmoil Van Halen has, I’m not surprised Cherone only lasted one record, but that record (and the tour, which was pretty great – Cherone and Michael Anthony did some great work on the Roth tunes, though the live show fell apart when they hit the weak stuff from the back half of “3”), was not as much of a catastrophe as everyone makes it out to be.