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let me begin by saying, for the record, that Van Halen rocks. Or, more accurately, Van Halen rocked. I say this with no trace of irony, no hint of precious indie-rock kitsch-envy, no desire to exorcise any glam-rock demons from a less discriminating musical past. This is not a confession.

Van Halen's first album was nothing short of monstrous, a throbbing wall of guitar crunch and bass thump that, from a purely sonic, crank it-or-spank it perspective, ranks up there with the shimmering high-volume necessity of "Nevermind" or Sonic Youth's "Dirty" (the comparison begins and ends right there). So what if David Lee Roth was a rakish egomaniac prone to spandex, leg warmers and onstage scissor kicks? He had, in his own words (of course), "charazzma" — a gender-bending, drag queen flamboyance that, in the guise of big-rock showmanship, infiltrated the minds of many an unsuspecting teenage boy. His unceremonious departure in 1985 was, for many, the End of Van Halen.

"Van Halen — Best Of, Vol. I," the band's recently released anthology, reinforces that belief, and proves what many of us have known for quite some time — that Roth's vanilla-flavored (and similarly dispatched) successor, Sammy Hagar, wouldn't know charazzma if it ran him off the highway and sprayed gravel in his face. A collection of tracks from just about every single Van Halen album to date (and then some), from their atomic 1978 debut and the good-but-not-great rockers that followed, through the Sammy years ('86-96) and into the great void that was last month's "reunion," "Vol. I" is a lopsided Hagar vs. Roth bout, and a reminder that, while rock 'n' roll may never die, it sure as hell can get pointless, bloated and generally lame along its path to immortality.

Compared to the lean and mean overdrive of early Roth-led tracks like "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" (1978) and "Unchained" (1981), the featured songs of "Van Hagar" come off as formulaic arena-rock bombast, either weighed down by insipid keyboard intros ("Dreams" and "When It's Love) or mired in uninspiring mid-tempo beats ("Poundcake" and "Humans Being"). With Hagar, the band sounds stuck on autopilot, circling middle America with an endlessly repeating pattern of hollow wanna-be anthems. Even when Roth was at his cartoonish worst, with songs like "Jump" and "Panama" (both of which appear on "Vol. I"), he still had an edge — a late-night, Hollywood Boulevard hustler's swagger that Hagar just couldn't touch from Main Street, USA.

What "Vol. I" also proves, unfortunately, is that last month's disastrous "reunion" of Dave with the original band was, at best, mercifully short. "Can't Get This Stuff No More," and "Me Wise Magic," the two songs borne of that P.R. stunt that appear here, are plodding, hackneyed practice-room throwaways that barely even hold their own against the Van Hagar stuff. The chemistry Diamond Dave and the brothers 'Halen so clearly had in the early days appears to be long gone now, so bypass this one and head for the Used CD section.

— David Fenton

David Fenton is a regular contributor to Salon.