This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/24/acdc-rock-or-bust-first-listen-review
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 1 | Version 2 |
|---|---|
| AC/DC – Rock or Bust first listen review – 'If this is to be their last album, they haven't disgraced themselves' | AC/DC – Rock or Bust first listen review – 'If this is to be their last album, they haven't disgraced themselves' |
| (3 days later) | |
| The 16th AC/DC studio album should, really, have been a lap of honour. Their last, 2008’s Black Ice, entered the charts at No 1 in 29 countries, their first US No 1 since 1981’s For Those About to Rock We Salute You. The 168 shows of the supporting tour grossed $441.6m. Alongide the Rolling Stones and U2 they have a legimitate claim to being the biggest live band in the world | The 16th AC/DC studio album should, really, have been a lap of honour. Their last, 2008’s Black Ice, entered the charts at No 1 in 29 countries, their first US No 1 since 1981’s For Those About to Rock We Salute You. The 168 shows of the supporting tour grossed $441.6m. Alongide the Rolling Stones and U2 they have a legimitate claim to being the biggest live band in the world |
| After spending the first 20 years of their career being disdained by critics, despite their staggering commercial success, they’ve spent the last 20 transmuting into international treasures. Certainly, these days, it’s hard to find a critic outside the Financial Times willing to say the things about them that were routine when they were making their way up: “AC/DC’s dedication to the primeval stomp sustained my interest for about 20 minutes, but the utter lack of variety and Angus’s increasingly excessive guitar solos ultimately registered as boring in the extreme,” said one Los Angeles Times reviewer in 1979. | After spending the first 20 years of their career being disdained by critics, despite their staggering commercial success, they’ve spent the last 20 transmuting into international treasures. Certainly, these days, it’s hard to find a critic outside the Financial Times willing to say the things about them that were routine when they were making their way up: “AC/DC’s dedication to the primeval stomp sustained my interest for about 20 minutes, but the utter lack of variety and Angus’s increasingly excessive guitar solos ultimately registered as boring in the extreme,” said one Los Angeles Times reviewer in 1979. |
| But Rock or Bust arrives at the most troubling time the band have faced since the death of their original singer Bon Scott in 1980. Earlier this year it was announced that Malcolm Young, AC/DC’s rhythm guitarist, founder and de facto leader had left the band, owing to dementia. Earlier this month, drummer Phil Rudd found himself in what Angus Young delicately referred to as “a pickle”, with charges brought against him for possession of drugs and making threats to kill. | But Rock or Bust arrives at the most troubling time the band have faced since the death of their original singer Bon Scott in 1980. Earlier this year it was announced that Malcolm Young, AC/DC’s rhythm guitarist, founder and de facto leader had left the band, owing to dementia. Earlier this month, drummer Phil Rudd found himself in what Angus Young delicately referred to as “a pickle”, with charges brought against him for possession of drugs and making threats to kill. |
| So Rock or Bust – which doesn’t feature Malcolm Young, but does feature Rudd, in what may well be his last involvement with AC/DC – arrives not as a coronation, but as that rarest of things: an album from a veteran group with a clearly defined and unaltered sound that is unusually keenly awaited by people outside the fanbase, even if it’s more the result of grisly rubbernecking than any especial desire to hear whether circumstance has forced a radical reinvention on AC/DC. | So Rock or Bust – which doesn’t feature Malcolm Young, but does feature Rudd, in what may well be his last involvement with AC/DC – arrives not as a coronation, but as that rarest of things: an album from a veteran group with a clearly defined and unaltered sound that is unusually keenly awaited by people outside the fanbase, even if it’s more the result of grisly rubbernecking than any especial desire to hear whether circumstance has forced a radical reinvention on AC/DC. |
| The best AC/DC songs have always been, if not sophisticated, then remarkably thoughtfully constructed. Rather than just pairing a riff and a chorus, like most of their hard rock brethren, they’ve always been able to find some little extra, some clever manipulation of the formula: Angus Young’s descending guitar line after the riff of Back in Black that provides the song’s big hook; the way Riff Raff uses its monstrous central riff so sparingly, doling it out almost like a treat to kids learning deferred gratification. It’s why AC/DC have always been a cut above virtually all other hard rock groups, and why the wider world has come to the belated recognition of the fact that they really are one of the greatest bands ever, not just a caricature of adolescent male sexuality. | The best AC/DC songs have always been, if not sophisticated, then remarkably thoughtfully constructed. Rather than just pairing a riff and a chorus, like most of their hard rock brethren, they’ve always been able to find some little extra, some clever manipulation of the formula: Angus Young’s descending guitar line after the riff of Back in Black that provides the song’s big hook; the way Riff Raff uses its monstrous central riff so sparingly, doling it out almost like a treat to kids learning deferred gratification. It’s why AC/DC have always been a cut above virtually all other hard rock groups, and why the wider world has come to the belated recognition of the fact that they really are one of the greatest bands ever, not just a caricature of adolescent male sexuality. |
| The first two songs of Rock or Bust suggest the absence of Malcolm Young has done nothing to affect that ability to step above the competition. The title track shows a space-filled riff, hides it again, and returns it to view, switching between three riffs for the bulk of the song. It’s an absolutely standard AC/DC song, but then no one buys an AC/DC album in the hope of stumbling across interpretations of madrigals. It’s followed by the single Play Ball, which wouldn’t sound out of place on any AC/DC album since Highway to Hell, and is by some distance the best song on Rock or Bust: every element sounds so perfectly attuned to every other that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t existed forever. If there’s also an awful lot to it that sounds like you’ve heard it on other AC/DC records – a descending hook like Back in Black, a solo very reminiscent of Hell’s Bells, an overall feel not unrelated to You Shook Me All Night Long – then you don’t make 16 albums of startling similarity without sometimes borrowing from yourself. | The first two songs of Rock or Bust suggest the absence of Malcolm Young has done nothing to affect that ability to step above the competition. The title track shows a space-filled riff, hides it again, and returns it to view, switching between three riffs for the bulk of the song. It’s an absolutely standard AC/DC song, but then no one buys an AC/DC album in the hope of stumbling across interpretations of madrigals. It’s followed by the single Play Ball, which wouldn’t sound out of place on any AC/DC album since Highway to Hell, and is by some distance the best song on Rock or Bust: every element sounds so perfectly attuned to every other that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t existed forever. If there’s also an awful lot to it that sounds like you’ve heard it on other AC/DC records – a descending hook like Back in Black, a solo very reminiscent of Hell’s Bells, an overall feel not unrelated to You Shook Me All Night Long – then you don’t make 16 albums of startling similarity without sometimes borrowing from yourself. |
| What happens afterwards is more of a problem, though. The songs on Rock or Bust are credited to Malcolm Young and Angus Young, which means in practice – according to Angus – they were put together from bits and pieces the brothers had accumulated over the years, rather than being written to order, given Malcolm was in no condition to write for the album. And, especially in the middle of the album, they actually sound like they were assembled from bits and pieces. Too many songs lack any manipulation of the formula: there’s too much meat-and-potatoes riff-and-chorus, not enough little extras. Virtually all the riffs would have their place on any AC/DC record, but they might be some brief moment in a song, rather than the main focus. The midpoint of the album, Got Some Rock & Roll Thunder, sounds anything but thoughtfully constructed: it leaves one praying they haven’t got any Rock & Roll Showers, Rock & Roll Snowstorms or Rock & Roll Lightning to follow it. | What happens afterwards is more of a problem, though. The songs on Rock or Bust are credited to Malcolm Young and Angus Young, which means in practice – according to Angus – they were put together from bits and pieces the brothers had accumulated over the years, rather than being written to order, given Malcolm was in no condition to write for the album. And, especially in the middle of the album, they actually sound like they were assembled from bits and pieces. Too many songs lack any manipulation of the formula: there’s too much meat-and-potatoes riff-and-chorus, not enough little extras. Virtually all the riffs would have their place on any AC/DC record, but they might be some brief moment in a song, rather than the main focus. The midpoint of the album, Got Some Rock & Roll Thunder, sounds anything but thoughtfully constructed: it leaves one praying they haven’t got any Rock & Roll Showers, Rock & Roll Snowstorms or Rock & Roll Lightning to follow it. |
| Some of the songs, too, sound like either recastings of old numbers, or perhaps versions that were never used. Rock the Blues Away is a cousin of Anything Goes from Black Ice, with some of its topline melody identical; Baptism by Fire has a riff that’s awfully similar to Beating Around the Bush from Highway to Hell. Dogs of War continues the slightly baffling interest in man’s imhumanity to man displayed by Black Ice’s War Machine, though more from the perspective of Sven Hassel than Marguerite Duras. | Some of the songs, too, sound like either recastings of old numbers, or perhaps versions that were never used. Rock the Blues Away is a cousin of Anything Goes from Black Ice, with some of its topline melody identical; Baptism by Fire has a riff that’s awfully similar to Beating Around the Bush from Highway to Hell. Dogs of War continues the slightly baffling interest in man’s imhumanity to man displayed by Black Ice’s War Machine, though more from the perspective of Sven Hassel than Marguerite Duras. |
| As ever, the lyrics won’t be giving Bob Dylan any sleepless nights, and titling a song Emission Control has one wondering, first, if even the members of AC/DC laugh at their own puns and, second, if there might be some truth in Chunklet magazine’s spoof minutes of an AC/DC board meeting: “Angus: ‘Malcolm, what are you giggling about? Do you want to share it with the group?’ Malcolm: ‘Yeah. Put Your Glove on My Love.’ Phil: ‘Boys, we might as well pack up and go home. We’re not going to do better than that.’” | As ever, the lyrics won’t be giving Bob Dylan any sleepless nights, and titling a song Emission Control has one wondering, first, if even the members of AC/DC laugh at their own puns and, second, if there might be some truth in Chunklet magazine’s spoof minutes of an AC/DC board meeting: “Angus: ‘Malcolm, what are you giggling about? Do you want to share it with the group?’ Malcolm: ‘Yeah. Put Your Glove on My Love.’ Phil: ‘Boys, we might as well pack up and go home. We’re not going to do better than that.’” |
| There’s a case to be made that if they had paid a little more attention to lyrical detail, AC/DC might be considered the equal of the Rolling Stones, who weren’t averse to casual misogyny and tossed-off crap in their lyrics themselves, but also had the ability to capture lightning in a bottle when it really mattered. Bon Scott wrote some genuinely excellent lyrics, especially on the 1978 album Powerage, but it would be fair to say that Back in Black, in 1980, was the last AC/DC record to feature a lyric set that provided any interest to rival the music, which may be why fans have long speculated – in the face of steadfast official denials – that some of the lyrics might have been written by Scott before his death. There’s no especial nadir here, but you know as soon as Brian Johnson sings the word “car” in Rock the Blues Away that the next line will end with “bar”; the next couplet, with crushing inevitability, rhymes “night” and “all right”. But if one accepts that one of AC/DC’s main titling techniques has been to take the words Rock’n’Roll and simply add a noun on the end – Singer, Damnation, Train, Dream, IT Helpdesk, Bungalow – then calling a song Got Some Rock & Roll Thunder counts as positively adventurous. | There’s a case to be made that if they had paid a little more attention to lyrical detail, AC/DC might be considered the equal of the Rolling Stones, who weren’t averse to casual misogyny and tossed-off crap in their lyrics themselves, but also had the ability to capture lightning in a bottle when it really mattered. Bon Scott wrote some genuinely excellent lyrics, especially on the 1978 album Powerage, but it would be fair to say that Back in Black, in 1980, was the last AC/DC record to feature a lyric set that provided any interest to rival the music, which may be why fans have long speculated – in the face of steadfast official denials – that some of the lyrics might have been written by Scott before his death. There’s no especial nadir here, but you know as soon as Brian Johnson sings the word “car” in Rock the Blues Away that the next line will end with “bar”; the next couplet, with crushing inevitability, rhymes “night” and “all right”. But if one accepts that one of AC/DC’s main titling techniques has been to take the words Rock’n’Roll and simply add a noun on the end – Singer, Damnation, Train, Dream, IT Helpdesk, Bungalow – then calling a song Got Some Rock & Roll Thunder counts as positively adventurous. |
| But just as no one will be buying Rock or Bust in the hope of interpretations of madrigals, equally no one will be approaching it in expectation of a searing lyrical analysis of the state of the world. They will be hoping to get themselves some rock’n’roll thunder, to rock the house or perhaps simply to rock the blues away. And in its final third Rock or Bust picks up again, albeit not to the heights of Powerage, Highway to Hell or Back in Black. Sweet Candy – not a song about making selections at the pick’n’mix – is a perfectly reasonable midtempo rocker; Rock the House and Emission Control have a dirty, bluesy feel familiar from the last but one AC/DC record, Stiff Upper Lip, and the latter has a terrific transition to its chorus, even if no one over the age of 14 is going to want to be caught singing along to said chorus. | But just as no one will be buying Rock or Bust in the hope of interpretations of madrigals, equally no one will be approaching it in expectation of a searing lyrical analysis of the state of the world. They will be hoping to get themselves some rock’n’roll thunder, to rock the house or perhaps simply to rock the blues away. And in its final third Rock or Bust picks up again, albeit not to the heights of Powerage, Highway to Hell or Back in Black. Sweet Candy – not a song about making selections at the pick’n’mix – is a perfectly reasonable midtempo rocker; Rock the House and Emission Control have a dirty, bluesy feel familiar from the last but one AC/DC record, Stiff Upper Lip, and the latter has a terrific transition to its chorus, even if no one over the age of 14 is going to want to be caught singing along to said chorus. |
| It would be nice to think that maybe there’s one more album in AC/DC, one where they strip things right back, where they think about what they’re writing about, but it’s probably a forlorn hope. For a start, would joyous heavy rock meditating on mortality actually sound any good? And if a group of extremely rich men decided to sing about what they actually knew, it would hardly connect with their vast and hugely loyal audience: while the mind boggles at the notion of AC/DC writing a song comparing Johnson and bassist Cliff Williams’s wine cellars, it’s not really a goer, even if it does raise the prospect of a track called Rock & Roll Margaux Premier Cru. | It would be nice to think that maybe there’s one more album in AC/DC, one where they strip things right back, where they think about what they’re writing about, but it’s probably a forlorn hope. For a start, would joyous heavy rock meditating on mortality actually sound any good? And if a group of extremely rich men decided to sing about what they actually knew, it would hardly connect with their vast and hugely loyal audience: while the mind boggles at the notion of AC/DC writing a song comparing Johnson and bassist Cliff Williams’s wine cellars, it’s not really a goer, even if it does raise the prospect of a track called Rock & Roll Margaux Premier Cru. |
| So If this is to be the last AC/DC album – and with their records now coming at an average of once every five years and Brian Johnson now being 67, that has to be considered a possibility, at the very least – then they have not disgraced themselves. But let’s see how the world looks to Young, Johnson and Williams after this one’s gone to No 1 in three dozen countries and the resulting tour has raked in the gross national product of a Balkan state. Their appetites may not yet be completely sated. | So If this is to be the last AC/DC album – and with their records now coming at an average of once every five years and Brian Johnson now being 67, that has to be considered a possibility, at the very least – then they have not disgraced themselves. But let’s see how the world looks to Young, Johnson and Williams after this one’s gone to No 1 in three dozen countries and the resulting tour has raked in the gross national product of a Balkan state. Their appetites may not yet be completely sated. |
| • Brian Johnson’s manager has contacted the Guardian to assure us that Brian Johnson did, indeed, write all the lyrics to Back in Black. |