And 'Jump' was about as close as got to pop, as the other seven songs - with the exception of 'I'll Wait,' which rides along on a synth riff as chilly as 'Jump' is warm - are heavy rock, capturing the same fiery band that's been performing with a brutal intensity since.īut where those albums placed an emphasis on the band's attack, this places an emphasis on the songs, and they're uniformly terrific, the best set of original tunes ever had. And grounded the song, keeping it from floating to pop, and simply exploded with boundless energy, making this seem rock & roll no matter how close it got to pop.

Of course, the mere addition of a synth wasn't enough to rope in fair-weather fans - they needed pop hooks and pop songs, which had, most gloriously on the exuberant, timeless 'Jump.' There, the synths played a circular riff that wouldn't have sounded as overpowering on guitar, but the band didn't dispense with their signature monolithic, pulsating rock.

Those synths were either buried beneath guitars or used as texture, even on instrumentals where they were the main instrument, but here they were pushed to the forefront on 'Jump,' the album's first single and one of the chief reasons this became a blockbuster, crossing over to pop audiences had flirted with before but had never quite won over. At the time of its release, much of the fuss surrounding involved 's adoption of synthesizers on this, their sixth album - a hoopla that was a bit of a red herring since the band had been layering in synths since their third album.

Van Halen 1984 Full Album Torrent