Amazon.com essential recording
In 1976, when the Eagles, Peter Frampton, and Heart ruled the rock airwaves, along came five scruffy young men (the lead guitarist was maybe all of 18 and dressed in a schoolboy's uniform) from Australia playing some of the rowdiest, hardest, dirtiest rock of all time. Screaming "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)," singer Bon Scott teased like a braggart. Sensing the rock community's growing dissatisfaction with bloated, epic-scaled bands, AC/DC were indeed a high-voltage act: their drummer nailed the beat with fury, their bluesy guitar riffs mutated into something metallic and sharp-edged, and Scott's vocals took the shrillness of early Robert Plant to a leaner and meaner place. "Live Wire" is one of the most electrifying hard rock songs imaginable, "High Voltage" and "TNT" are the musical equivalent of touching exposed nerves with a rusty fork, and "Jack" proves that white rock dudes can, contrary to popular belief,
get down. Whew!
--Lorry Fleming
From Amazon.co.uk
Even this early in their career, AC/DC realised that their brutally reductive take on rock & roll amounted to perfection of the form, and they've been reluctant to tamper with a winning formula ever since.
High Voltage, their debut album, is remarkable in the context of AC/DC's vast, awesomely single-minded discography for containing what remains AC/DC's lone foray into experimentation in nearly three decades: the delightfully incongruous bagpipe solo in the opening track, "It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock & Roll)". Elsewhere, business as usual: drums like the plods of a lumbering dinosaur, bass like the ominous rumbleof a waking volcano, the 17-year-old Angus Young's guitars as crude and effective as circular saws. Vocalist Bon Scott is on fine, defiantly self-aggrandising form: the title track and "TNT" were two of the most irresistibly, cretinous anthems he would ever write, which is high praise indeed.
--Andrew Mueller