10 Rock Albums That Are Way Too Bloated

For as flashy as Van Halen could be during the '80s, there was never a moment where you thought they were jamming for the hell of it. If you go back and listen to the David Lee Roth era of the band, they had a pretty good track record of giving you everything that you needed across a record and getting out of there in a little over half an hour. They never wasted any note they played, but something started to change once Sammy Hagar entered the fold.

While the Van Hagar years certainly have their share of highlights, OU812 is where you start to see some of the big problems emerge in the band's songwriting. It might be hard considering an album of only 10 songs bloated, but what makes the album drag is just how long the songs are. These aren't necessarily prog rock exercises by any means, but you can tell on songs like Finish What Ya Started that the band is starting to drag their feet just a little bit, almost verging on dad rock territory with some of the more boozy cuts that they left on the record.

And it looked like the band tried to learn from their mistakes here as well, bringing producer Ted Templeman back into the fold for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and pumping out a fairly decent project all around. Most Van Halen projects tend to give you a good time from back to front, but this is the first album in their catalog where you can just cherry pick the hits from the time and then move on to the next project.