Panama

Panama detonates with one of rock's most gleeful engine noises — Eddie Van Halen's guitar tuned down and swaggering through a riff that struts rather than sprints, all upstroke and grin. The production is bone-dry and enormous: Alex's snare cracks like a screen door, the guitars sit forward with almost no reverb, and there's air around everything, the sound of a band playing in a room rather than a machine. David Lee Roth sings like a man narrating his own highlight reel, half-yelping, half-laughing, and the famous midsection — his purring spoken-word over the recorded idle of his own Lamborghini, mic'd in the studio parking lot — is one of the great jokes in hard rock, a song about a car pretending to be a song about a woman pretending to be a song about a car. Nothing here is sad or searching; the emotional landscape is pure kinetic appetite, sunshine and asphalt and the belief that Friday night is a moral position. Culturally it's peak 1984 Van Halen, the moment before Roth left and the band grew synthesizers and feelings. It belongs to windows-down driving, to the fourth beer at a backyard party, to any moment when you want music that refuses, absolutely, to be introspective.