Just bought the new AC/DC Album "Black Ice".
In the words of Borat: "Is nice"
The album is exactly what you'd expect from AC/DC. Which is to say it's exactly like the last AC/DC record. What's not to like?
When you have perfected Rock, where do you go from there? You rock some more, naturally. You cant improve on perfection. AC/DC know better than to try.
Before i even heard it, just looking at the pictures on the sleeve got me giggling in fits. Angus just gets funnier as he gets older. It was funny to have a grown man in a school uniform pulling an infantile lippy smirk. To see a bloke in his late 50's doing it cracks me up.
How can the same joke still be funny so many years later? True genius that's how.
The ridiculousness of Angus' act is a shining of example of how not to take life seriously.
A guitarist who used to play for Alice Cooper once said to me "If you go to an AC/DC show and you dont have a good time, you're an asshole." He was a Canadian so that spelling of "asshole" is correct, and the meaning is slightly different from the British/Aussie/NZ "arsehole". An arsehole is an immoral person, an asshole can be an unlikable person in other ways too, two examples being a miserable asshole and a stupid asshole. My friend meant the latter.
AC/DC is about having a good time. Anyone who knows what a good time is understands AC/DC on some level - above or below the belt.
The new album opens strongly with the single Rock'n'Roll Train, a song about an wanton woman as unstoppable in her escapades as a hurtling juggernaut. The song has the same irresistible momentum as the subject. Toe-taping head-banging bliss.
Next track of note for me was track 3 Big Jack, a guy who's "got your back". First hoes, then bros. Brilliant. The only other subject they have to cover is beer and it's all there. This tune has some major key blues chord work that sounds like the Cult's attempts at mimicking AC/DC, with more subtly complex arrangement befitting the original masters of the "guitar bite".
The next track was a pleasant surprize, and the one I was looking for. Songs like this are the difference between good and great AC/DC records. The song is called "Anything Goes" and it's a major-key melodic rocker akin to You Shook Me All Night Long and Money Talks . When there is a melodic singalong like this on an acadaca record it shows they have really pushed the envelope and put alot of effort into the writing. Men with balls as large as AC/DC need to be very confident of themselves before they express the smiley kind-hearted feelings the major key requires. Top track.
Other awesome tracks is the bluesy, gritty and downright eerie Stormy May Day. To get the ominousness across Johnston drops his voice a couple of octaves at the end, into the register in which mortals speek - intimate, or intimidating? you be the judge. I gotta say that you could write the crappiest song in the world but if Brian Johnston sang it would still be awesome. He could make Mary Had A Little Lamb strip paint.
Apart from the rifftastic title track, I cant really recall exactly how most of the other tracks went. I'll update this if more of them leap out of the riffy entanglment to strangle me, but when the overall standard is this high, it's hard to get noticed.
One title does jump out at me though, Money Made. As a rock fan I am green with envy at the ability of rap artists to sing about money and making money and make it sound cool. Rock musos are always so obsessed with dressing down and looking like commies and singing about their unfortunate lot in life. If they make money they hide it. It's pathetic really, but you can understand it because it will kill your career if you dont fall into line. AC/DC are breaking the glass ceiling for rockers who not only want to be capitalists (all musicians are business-people) but also ... sound like it. I was going to say "look like it", but let's face it AC/DC have not progressed that far yet. They wouldn't know what an iron was, not without the maiden anyway.
That AC/DC are so popular worldwide is Australia's greatest cultural achievement. Especially since the sound so Australian!
Basically they exported the gleeful Aussie sense of misbehaviour and mischief, and sold more albums than anyone apart from Micheal Jackson. (look it up, fool: #1 Thriller, #2 Back In Black)
AC/DC can teach all of us about how to have a good time, but they also hold a lesson for the new generation of Aussie musicians:
Firstly Australian bands should sound Australian, not like pale imitations of the latest American or British trend.
Secondly and more importantly YOU CANNOT BE A ROCK STAR IF YOU DO NOT ROCK!!!!!
The more you rock, the more success you will have. Stop trying to sound so pissweak. Nobody likes it except the lazy hacks in the indie record labels.
Rock is not the preoccupation of some fringe group in society, ROCK IS THE MAINSTREAM.
What is the highest praise you can ever give to anyone or anything?
One simply says "YOU ROCK", "THIS ROCKS", "HE/SHE/IT ROCKED", "WE WILL ROCK YOU".
You can conjugate the verb to rock more ways than you can re-arrange the chords in an AC/DC track to make another AC/DC track.
And that's more than enough to enjoy life.
.... That last bit made no sense at all. I think the AC/DC is affecting my thinking. Thank God for that. Whooo hooo!!!!!
And by God, of course I mean Angus Young.
