Well, for one thing it is wrong to market this album with the words "the first livealbum with David Lee Roth on vocals". Honestly, listening to this, that tag-line is akin to trying to sell a used car with a sales sticker proclaiming "it used to run quite smoothly". We all know that David was never much of a singer but after all there is quite a long way from "never much of a singer" to "sounds like a beached seal in severe agony" which is the case here.

The tracklist on this double album reads like every Van Halen fan's wet dream but those classics like "Runnin' With The Devil", "Everybody Wants Some", "Mean Street", "Jump", "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" etc. are let sorely down by Roth's wailing and yellling (not so much outa tune as on another planet) and an atrocious soundmix. Really, this album sounds like a bootleg and the fact that Van Halen released this stuff with a sound like this sadly just goes to show that they really don't care that much any longer. They just had to have some "product" out apparently.

Having a fantastic drummer like Alex Van Halen's intricacies buried to deep in the mix is frankly criminal for instance.

Not so surprisingly though is guitarist Edward Van Halen saving what there is to be saved. The guy still plays like a man possessed and yet again proves that no other guitarist in this style is worthy of polishing his fretboard.

Now, the guitarplaying WOULD have procured Van Halen the third star in this review. If not for the soundmix and the sneaking suspicion that Van Halen simply don't really care no more as stated earlier. That ain't no way to honour one of the greatest legacies in American rock and roll.

This being written by a guy who was a veritable slave to everything Van Halen from their debut in 1978 and almost twenty years on. I don't want to remember Van Halen for something like this and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only VH fan feeling like that.

A lot of us ARE talkin' 'bout love Van Halen and we quite honestly deserve better than this!