Customer Rating:  
Summary: 70s + 80s Meet
Comment: While the first Van Halen record will always be my favorite, I did enjoy "Women and Children First." While "Van Halen I" has more of an 80s sound, and "Van Halen II" has kind of a 70s sound, "Women and Children First" seems to have a little of each. 'And the Cradle Will Rock' is a pretty good opener. 'Everybody Wants Some' is one of the most 80s sounding songs on the record. 'Fools' was strange, but interesting. 'Romeo Delight' is listenable. 'Tora Tora' was unusual but still good. 'Loss of Control' has kind of a strange sound, but it does have its charm. 'Take Your Whiskey Home' sounds notably softer, but has a 70s charm. (Some would probably say 60s.) While also on the gentler side, 'Could This Be Magic' cleverly inserts the title of the record. (While not the most heavy track on the record, 'Could This Be Magic?' arguably steals the record.) 'In a Simple Rhyme' is a bit anticlimactic, but still good. Overall, it's a good record.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Van Halen's best album ever
Comment: Wow I haven't heard this album in years. Due to their recent reunion tour, minus Michael Anthony(shame on you), with Wolf, Eddie's son, I was really motivated to buy their CD catalogue. I only like the David Lee Roth years. That's real Van Halen. This album just Rocks. Eddies guitar sounds so clean and turned up! Really brings back those cool High School party years. A+++
Who's Sammy???
Customer Rating:
Summary: could this album be magic? YES!
Comment: after the brilliance of their first two albums, van halen ups the ante so to speak on this record. "loss of control" is the only song on here that smells like filler, but otherwise, you hear a band that has tightened its sound from non-stop touring the previous two years. and this album also contains roth's best lyric ever: "have you seen junior's grades?" classic!
Customer Rating:
Summary: And my cradle was rocked...
Comment: I remember listening to this for the first time, I thought it was the best band I had ever heard.
My favorite will always be DAVID LEE ROTH.
Now that VH has reunited with ROTH, I will get to see ROTH with VAN HALEN.
LOSS OF CONTROL 10/10
Fools 10/10
COULD THIS BE MAGIC 10/10
These are my favorite songs on the album.
I rate this CD a 9 from 1to10!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: This is where Van Halen opened up their sound
Comment: By 1980, Van Halen were certified rock stars. They had put two LPs (albeit rather similar sounding to one another) which were massively successful, they were selling out arena tours, and had become one of America's premier hard rock bands. So when they went into the studio a third time, they wisely chose to branch out their sound and record a much stylistically broader set of songs that had yet been heard by Van Halen's fans.
If you listen to Van Halen's discography in chronological process (a good practice to do with any band or musical artist, to get a glimpse of their career path and musical projectory), WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST is one of the most important records to their career, and proved to be both a transitional record and one of the most underrated albums of their career. Their debut established the `Van Halen' sound, and VH II followed that sound without changing it up at all. Had they done so a third time, it would have been an artistic misfire and the band would probably start to fade from public consciousness.
Thankfully, Van Halen didn't do that. Instead, they introduced keyboards (Cradle Will Rock has keyboards processed through a guitar amp), does a bluesy acoustic, almost folk sound number (Could This Be Magic, one of the most underrated VH songs ever), some social commentary (!!) about rock fans and their relationship to their parents and authority figures (Cradle Will Rock), stretches out their musical muscle (Fools), and shows they can write some flat-out great hard rock songs (Romeo's Delight, Loss of Control, In a Simple Rhyme). While "Tora! Tora!" is more of a riff and an intro to "Loss of Control" than a real song, the other eight songs prove Van Halen was becoming a much more ambitious band the third time around. It is true that you have to spend more time with this record than the previous two to fully appreciate the music, but it is time well spent, much of it finding the different layers to the music.
What makes WOMEN so wonderful is how natural this expansion of the Van Halen sound is. They have more musical ambition, develop their song-writing skills, and just manage to churn out one of their most idiosyncratic records. While VHII sounds simply like VH repeated, WOMEN sounds like the real followup to the debut. And while I have always found "Everybody Wants Some" rather sophomoric in the lyrical department, the music itself is outstanding. On a moral level, I find myself disagreeing with "Everybody Wants Some", largely due to the sheer promiscuity it promotes, as well as at the very end Roth is propositioning a prostitute (he says "Look, I'll pay you for it, what the f--?" "In a Simple Rhyme", for my money, is one of the best VH songs recorded, and should have been a hit on the same level as any of their other famous material. I've also always had a partial "Could This Be Magic", Van Halen's equivalent of Zeppelin's "Going To California". What I mean by that is it's a fantastic folk song by a band mostly known for hard rock (though Zeppelin had a huge variety of style and texture to their work as well).
Overall, the music Van Halen recorded for this album is looser, funkier, and covers a much wider spectrum of music than their previous two records. The music sounds live, lived in, and like the band's been playing this music for that rare period of time when the material is still fresh enough, but more than capable of playing the material, and that point where the band has played the songs so much they just needed a break from it. Why WACF isn't more highly regarded is beyond me. I think this is easily their most underrated album.
Interestingly enough, when "In a Simple Rhyme" ends, a short 20 second untitled instrumental starts. The name of this instrumental, nowhere listed on the packaging, is "Growth", and was originally going to be used to as the opening track to WACF's followup. This followup turned out to be "Fair Warning", and the original idea was to use "Growth" as the opening track was unfortunately abandoned. It has some great, undeveloped potential.
Although the majority of the record may not be as immediately accessible as the biggest songs off the 1978 debut and 1984, overall it is a record that reveals more and more with each listen and reveals itself to be a record with as much lasting power as either of those two titans. It may take you a little bit to get into, but once you do, you'll be hooked.
Bottom line: Even though VAN HALEN or 1984 or the first two logical places to start listening to Van Halen with Roth was in the band, for the newbies this is a great place to start as well. Given how underrated it is, it would be nice for new listeners saying their first VH record was this one. I know a lot of people get nostalgic about records that got them into different bands, and it'd be nice if this was that record for more people than it is now, given its underrated status.
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