High Voltage [Remaster] (CD - 1976)

AC/DC: Bon Scott (voclas); Malcolm Young, Angus Young (guitar); Mark Evans (bass); Phil Rudd (drums).

The 2003 edition of HIGH VOLTAGE includes liner notes by Murray Engelheart.

All tracks have been digitally remastered.

This is a Hyper CD, which contains regular audio tracks and also provides a link to the artist's website with the help of a web browser.

Personnel: Bon Scott (vocals); Malcolm Young, Angus Young (guitar); Phil Rudd (drums).

Audio Remasterer: Ted Jensen.

Liner Note Author: Murray Engleheart.

Photographers: Dick Barnatt; Erica Echenberg; Colin Stead; Michael Putland; Philip Morris.

One of the perennial complaints about AC/DC is that they've never changed -- and if that's true, High Voltage is the blueprint they've followed all their career. Comprised of highlights from their first two Australian albums -- 1975's TNT and its 1976 follow-up, also entitled High Voltage -- the album has every single one of AC/DC's archetypes. There are songs about rock & roll, slow sleazy blues, high-voltage boogie, double entendres so obvious they qualify as single entendres and, of course, the monster riffs of Angus Young, so big and bold they bruise the listener upon contact. It's those riffs -- so catchy they sound lifted when they're original, so simple they're often wrongly dismissed as easy -- that give the music its backbone, the foundation for Bon Scott to get dirty, and rockers never got quite as dirty as Bon Scott. Scott sounded as if you could catch a disease by listening to him. He sounded like the gateman at hell, somebody who never hid the notion that lurking behind the door are some bad, dangerous things, but they're also fun, too, and he made no apologies for that. But for as primal as High Voltage is, it's also a lot weirder and funnier than it's given credit for, too -- those are bagpipes that solo on "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock & Roll)," and "She's Got Balls" is a perversely funny dirty joke. This is music so primal that it's enduring -- it feels like it existed before AC/DC got there, and it will exist long afterward. And if AC/DC did wind up bettering this blueprint in the future, there's no question that this original is still potent, even thrilling, no matter how many times they returned to the well, or how many times this record is played. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

HIGH VOLTAGE was the first chance America had to glimpse the raw power of Australia's best hard rock outfit. From their earliest days, lead guitarist Angus Young, a spastic dwarf-like riff-monger who wore nothing but traditional schoolboy attire, led this band of hooligans with gleeful perversity and balls-out ambition. The group's intent is perfectly clear from the disc's opening power chords: to distill rock and mutate the blues down to its barest essentials in a pulverizing whomp. Riding over the top of the battering rhythm section is the all-too-true sneer of vocalist Bon Scott, who brings sexist anthems to a previously unachieved high (or low, depending on your reference point).

With over-the-top show-stoppers about gonorrhea ("The Jack"), HIGH VOLTAGE is not for the faint of heart. The single from this record, "T.N.T," got AC/DC into rock radio rotation and gave metal fans a template of the brand of molten lava the band would later weld into perfection. The formula for which the group would eventually become famous--songs based around three crunching power chords and the high-pitched squeal of a man who sounds like he's just been unleashed from the reformatory--is firmly established here. minimize