Van Halen Flubbery: Jump Sucks

Stick this one in the Better Late Than Never file…yeah, we just saw it.

We’re hearing mostly positives from Van Halen’s resurrection n’ resuscitation tour, but this version of Jump from Greensboro on 9/29 is just nasty. And I’ve switched back to using nasty in the bad way, not as in “How nasty was that, brahh?”

[youtube]Mjx_GjyXCs4[/youtube]

According to blogger Rob Warmowski, this is what happens when the recording they’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K. I have no fuckin’ clue whether that’s the correct explanation or not, but I figured I’d offer one man’s reasoning. He continues:

I can’t tell which is funnier, this long-hated cheesebag-anthem turned into a much more interesting, atonal mess in front of thousands of paying customers or the hilarious soldiering on of the Van Halens as they look at each other from inside the trainwreck. Eddie tries to transpose on the fly and match the wildly fucked up keyboards but the great thing there is the difference in pitch is non-musical – about 1.5 semitones sharp. So there’s no frets he can choose to fix the problem!

Good times, Van Halen, good times. Otherwise, the tour seems to be proving most of their critics and 100 years of medical science horribly wrong.