In 1987, hair metal dominated the charts. It was huge. Bands like Motley Crue and Def Leppard kick-started the trend, and countless bands followed. Some bands (like black metal titans Celtic Frost) changed their styles to hair metal just to be popular and make money. And one of the bands was Whitesnake.
Whitesnake's David Coverdale always wanted to be the next Robert Plant, there was no doubt about that. His voice emulated the Led Zeppelin vocalist, and even his hair did too. Whitesnake began as a bluesy hard rock band (like Led Zeppelin) but when hair metal was the thing to do, Coverdale jumped all over it and released Whitesnake's self-titled album. It was a success. I mean, the lead single had a hot chick in the video! It had to be huge! But the music was pretty terrible.
The Zeppelin influence is still clear in Coverdale's voice, yet on this album they seem to be ripping off a band that also adored Led Zeppelin. Def Leppard. In fact, when I first heard Here I Go Again, I thought it was Def Leppard. Yeah, so it's apparent that Coverdale is always ripping off someone.
The two lead singles from this album are the only decent songs. They are what singles should be. Catchy and fun, and you know whenever Whitesnake played those two songs live, the crowd went crazy. But it's clear as day that those are the only songs that Whitesnake actually put any sort of thought into. Every other song on the album is, well, awful. Typical hair metal garbage. You have the cheesy ballads, the rocking songs (that fail miserably) and everything else a hair metal album should have. But Whitesnake just couldn't pull of the genre as well as bands like Motley Crue and Twisted Sister could. They (at the beginning of their career) wrote songs that weren't actually meant to be huge, smash hits. Whitesnake was just jumping on a trend that wasn't that great to begin with, and they just couldn't pull it off.
It may sound like I just hate hair metal. Wrong. I love Motley Crue, I love WASP, I love Twisted Sister, I love Skid Row, and a few others as well. I just don't like Whitesnake. The pure lack of originality is bad enough, but the fact that they just can't pull off a good album is the main flaw.
1.5/5
