When you start to look at a history of rock, certain names have a lot of weight, predominantly ‘cause they’ve been around since the dinosaurs (and The Rolling Stones) roamed the earth. Iron Maiden. Status Quo. Bon Jovi, Metalllica. AC/DC – bands with discographies longer than a small novel, and normally sharing 10 drug addictions and 4 brain cells between the lot of them. A while ago I was reminded of the existence of the later of these when I finally got around to catching Robert Dowry Jr.’s latest adventure in red metal and alcoholism. People made a big thing of Iron Man 2’s reliance on AC/DC music, and it spurred me to check out the latest offering from everyone’s favourite Australian hard-rocking siblings (no, not those ones. Or those ones)
So, for those of you far to busy to read the whole thing, I have a simple question. Did you like Back in Black? Do you enjoy rocking and/or rolling? In which case, get this album (although you probably already have, since I’m admittedly a touch late to the party. In which case, good job! Go listen!) For everyone else, here’s the long version…
The first thing you notice upon picking up a copy of ‘Black Ice’, their most recent (2008) album, is the names. ‘Rock ‘n Roll Train’, ‘War Machine’, ‘Spoiling for a fight’, ‘She likes Rock n’ Roll’. It’s clear that old age and nearly a decade out of the studio, have not mellowed their outlook on life, nor their propensity to write songs about exactly two subjects - rock and women. We’re on familiar territory here, and the band knows it, playing to their strengths and creating an album as familiar as it is heavy. There is not a touch of over-production, and few fancy tricks. From the fast-paced opener of ‘Rock n’ Roll Train’ to the dirty blues crunch of ‘Stormy May Day’, the album is uncomplicated straight-up rock. And actually, it’s very refreshing. In a time when you can’t release an album without some strange synth elements, or incorporating the sounds of an obscure aboriginal tribe because it makes you a ‘proper’ musician, it’s a pleasant feeling to find an album that never tries to trick you, and doesn’t require a PhD in music nerdery to properly appreciate. This is straight up rock – the guitars never dip below ‘very distorted’ and it’s full of big, sing-along choruses that follow AC/DC’s age-old tradition of repeating the name of the song 5 times over. As ever, blues rock is the order of the day, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t branched out just a little bit. ‘Anything Goes’ is far mellower than much else they’ve put out. I wouldn’t call it a ballad by any stretch of the imagination, but it definitely owes alot to the likes of Bon Jovi – creamy reverb-laden guitar and met-her-in-a-bar lyrics. ‘Stormy May Day’ moves the formula in the opposite direction, using dirty slide to invoke a delta-blues feel. These kind of cuts provide nice distractions from the main affair, and help make the album feel far less like 15 copies of exactly the same song.
However, there is no escaping the fact that this is a band who see no need to escape the niche they’ve found for themselves. When you pick up this album, you know exactly what you’re getting into – pretty much exactly the same deal as the 15,000 albums that have come before. For most bands, this would be a deal-breaker – no-one wants to pay again for exactly the same songs. But AC/DC seem to be immune from such criticism – maybe it’s because they’ve been around for so long that they’ve got a free pass. Maybe it’s just because they are very good at what they do. This album doesn’t try to change anything that doesn’t need changing, and it makes no apologies for leaning heavily on its history. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but sometimes you don’t need to. Sometimes the tricks it’s known for years are still good enough for one more go around. So it is with ‘Black Ice’. Pick it up, crank it up loud and enjoy. Save your brain cells for the next pretentious indie album that takes itself far too seriously.
