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Highway To Hell - AC/DC
by blackbob
It's time to don your schoolboy uniform,strap on your SG and do the duck walk for my latest offering as we're taking a trip back to 1979 to review one of the greatest rock albums of all times and one of my all time favourites :)
AC/DC are a legendary Australian band.Often dubbed variously as hard rock or heavy metal to me they ... are,as they've always said themselves,simply a rock and roll band.And truly they are one of the very best.
I must,must,must not forget that I'm writing a product review and with that refrain echoing around my mind I think I best start with some background information for anyone who hasn't heard of the band or this album.So that would be Bieber fans and possibly some undiscovered tribe deep within the rain forest :)
Formed in Sydney by Glasgow born brothers Malcolm and Angus Young in 1973 they've gained millions of diehard fans playing great,straight forward,honest,high energy rock and roll music that's uncompromising and infectious.In 1974 they recruited Ronald Belford 'Bon' Scott,also Scots born,who'd go on to become an iconic frontman,voted No.
1 of all time in a Classic Rock readers poll.Rightly so in my opinion.
Releasing two albums in Australia 'High Voltage' in 1974 and 'TNT' in 1975 they signed to Atlantic Records in 1976 releasing their first international LP 'High Voltage' made up of songs from their two Australian albums in the same year.A ballsy,brash rock n roll album it was followed by 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap' in the same year and 'Let There Be Rock' in 1977.
The first 3 albums had very much a similar 12 bar bluesy,'Chuck Berry on speed' feel to them but their 1978 release 'Powerage' showed a true progression in developing their own trademark style and showed band that was really hitting the straps hard.
Released in August 1979 their next record Highway To Hell was the bands 5th international album and their most succesful to that point reaching 17 in the US album charts.From the opening chords of the title track Highway to Hell right till Bon Scott utters the words 'shazbut nanu nanu' (from Mork and Mindy) at the end of the closing number 'Night Prowler' are 10 bluesy,rocking songs of the highest quality each one a classic.There are no album fillers on this record.
The title song has become one of those iconic rock anthems alongside 'Whole lotta love' and 'Smoke on the Water' with a simple yet instantly memorable riff and is a staple at every live show since.
The album features a number of songs that are still regularly played at nearly every gig like 'Shot down in flames','If you want blood(you've got it)','Touch too much','Girls got rhythm' and the infamous 'Night Prowler'.Yet there are some real gems on here that maybe aren't so well known like the heavier,pounding rhythm of 'Walk all over you',the breakneck 'Beating around the bush' and the infectious groove of 'Love hungry man' and the excellent 'Get it hot'.
The cover features a painting of the band with Angus at the front holding his 'devils tail' in his hand and a pair of horns sprouting from his cap.Bon Scott is on the right wearing a pentagram pendant and the rest of the band on the left.The AC/DC logo is at the top and the album title at the bottom.A band photo is on the back cover with track listing.Quite a simple,uncluttered cover design which overall reflects the feel of this album.
Surprisingly there's less of Angus Young's trademark pyrotechnics than you may expect when it comes to his lead guitar work instead he displays a tighter more finely honed approach but for anyone who's familiar with his blistering guitar solos won't be disappointed by his more distilled,punchier breaks as he proves just why he's one of rock's greatest guitarist.Also that along with brother Malcolm he's one of the songwriting greats too.
Bon Scott's singing is as full of power,raw and glorious,wailing and moaning with that ever present character he had that sounded like he enjoyed every second of being a rock star.
There's always been an uncompromising honesty,a complete lack of any pretentiousness about everything AC/DC do that translates clearly through their music.It's about having a good time and that joy is spectacularly evident on this album.
Tragically several months after this album was released Bon Scott died after a night of heavy drinking,on the 19th Febuary 1980 and rock music lost one of it's greatest singers making Highway his final and finest work adding a certian significance to the record.
It is a must for all AC/DC and lovers of rock music and i'd recommend it to anyone.
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Mob Rules - Black Sabbath
by cheffrey
After two extremely tired sounding albums in the late 70s, Ozzy left/got booted out (delete as appropriate) as dynamics in the band became too fractious to continue as they were. Pinching the newly departed Rainbow singer Ronnie Dio to fill the post of frontman, Sabbath made a killer of a record with 'Heaven and Hell', a new lease of ... life for the band while Ozzy pursued an equally promising start to his solo years. Soon a second Dio-led album came out, and while professionally crafted (unlike its soggy mess of a successor 'Born Again'), 'Mob Rules' just never quite came together as a whole.
While Tony Iommi is quite rightly considered to be a walking riff machine, turning out some of the most memorable and monolithic bits of down-tuned guitar work committed to tape, his sound on this album feels like it's starting to slip into formula, somehow. While it's never good to get stuck in a formula, comparing his fretwork in the 80s to the early Black Sabbath records, it's hard to regard his later work as being as memorable. I only listened to this last night, and those are the only songs I can really recall with any clarity. Oh, 'E5150' is an overly long bit of synth noodling that I guess is supposed to be atmospheric, but comes across as total filler, just like 'FX' did on 'Volume Four' recorded a decade previously.
'Sign of the Southern Cross' is a treat though. The calm before the storm is Dio lilting to Iommi's acoustic lines, before crashing in with some heavy melodrama set to some titanic riffing. This, coupled with 'Falling off the Edge of the World' and the title track are what save it from being mediocre and forgettable. In the same way that Rainbow was ostensibly Ritchie Blackmore's side project but really Dio's band, he makes his mark on this album as well. His vocal style is light years removed from that of Ozzy's, and it is his stratospheric delivery that really gives this album its identity. In many ways, I thought it would have been more appropriate if the Black Sabbath moniker had been dropped altogether, the two versions of the band sound so different, but never mind.
Perhaps there are a couple of less immediately obvious reasons why this album didn't pack as much punch as it might. Listening to it straight after 'Heaven and Hell', they are so similar in many ways, particularly in terms of the album's structuring, that it's hard to judge it as anything but a rehashing of this. Both start with a salvo of faster, heavy numbers, but 'Turn Up the Night' doesn't have the same impact as 'Neon Knights'. It's also worth noting that original drummer Bill Ward is not present here either, and he has always been an undervalued member of the band, adding a subtle jazz swing and feel to the songs, even when things got really heavy he didn't just thump his kit to a pulp in a Lars Ulrich manner and hope for the best. His replacement, Vinny Appice, isn't sloppy, but these songs seem to be lacking that extra bit of groove in the rhythm.
It's a decent enough metal record, with enough punch and atmosphere overall to make it a good accompaniment to 'Heaven and Hell', but it's more of an extended appendix to that piece, really. It's well produced, capturing the powerful bits and treating the softer bits properly, and the performances are solid rather than lazy, but it feels like they're starting to slip into formula, and it's all the less interesting for it. At least the album artwork is cool though.
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Long Live Rock 'n' Roll - Rainbow
by cheffrey
Ritchie Blackmore's approach to being in a band could tentatively be described as 'mercurial'. It could also be described as downright psychotic, but talented people are rarely mundane and 'normal'. By the time Rainbow's third album, and the last to feature dynamic vocalist Ronnie James Dio, Blackmore had shifted personnel around several ... times; that's after having already stormed out on Deep Purple, of course.
Their previous LP 'Rainbow Rising' had been a self-described piece of 'thermonuclear rock and roll'. It certainly took heavy metal to a whole new degree, injecting a histrionic power into the towering epics cooked up by Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. And Dio and Blackmore's obsessions with all thing swordy and sorcerous was massively influential in the genre of metal as a whole. 'Long Live Rock and Roll' pretty much carries on where 'Rising' left off, and is replete with big sounding epics and blazing rock numbers that will have you reaching for your +5 broadsword or the off-switch, depending on how you take your musical tea.
The title track is surely an attempt to create a national anthem for rock music, but it falls way short of the mark there, merely by being eclipsed by other Rainbow compositions - most probably the subsequent recordings that dropped all the dungeons and dragons stuff and were all the more sterile for it. It gallops along at a frenetic pace, and Dio sounds like he means every word of it. Easy to believe as well, considering he dedicated his whole life to working in the industry until his life was cut short by a battle with cancer several years ago. 'Lady of the Lake' and 'Kill the King' are both overtly faux-medievalist in their themes, as can be detected by the titles. The latter is a screaming piece of silly metal, as Dio hits a near super-sonic performance as he regales us with a tale of treason at the hands of a nefarious queen, and 'Lady of the Lake' sounds remarkably like Led Zeppelin's 'Wanton Song', all dumb, sledge-hammer heavy riffing. It's pretty ejnoyable, especially if you've just watched 'Conan the Barbarian'.
'Gates of Babylon' is a multi-tiered epic from the same mould as 'Stargazer', and is very similar in feel as it weaves an atmosphere from Eastern modes, which is only fitting given its inspiration. It's also the start of the prevalence of cod-Satanism in some of Dio's work, as he reveals himself to be narrating in the guise of the devil. It's all a load of ridiculous panto of course, but the conservatives and critics hated it, leaping on it with the same fervour they did with Black Sabbath (only in the latter case they totally missed the point that it was written from a Catholic perspective, and oh, whatever) but I digress. It features David Stone on keyboards, who replaced Tony Carey half way through the sessions, and he makes his mark on the record with its eery intro and spooky lines.
The James Hetfield school of annunciation clearly took 'Sensitive to Light' as course 101, preceding his trademark lingering last syllable by the best part of a decade as Dio gruffly confesses that the girl of his desires is causing him no end of bother, as "She's a bright and shining star/But I just must be sensitive to liiight-ah!". Metallica probably owe at least 30% of their success to this song alone. 'The Shed' is a chance for Blackmore to show off, but it slumps into a mediocre bit of cock-rock fodder pretty quickly. Rainbow aren't a band to be taken too seriously, but that doesn't mean they can't thrill and bludgeon and also bore when they want to.
It's not all roaring dragon's fire and silly sonic wizardry though. Closing track 'Rainbow Eyes' is, well, a ballad. And while I don't mind ballads at all, this one has always felt just too damn twee and overly long to justify its inclusion. Remember the recorder bit at the beginning of 'Stairway to Heaven'? Mix that up with bits of 60s baroque pop and stretch it out to 7 minutes and you're pretty near the mark. It could have been a fairly innocuous Renaissance interlude, if it had been scythed down and jammed in the middle of side one, but it's a really saccharine piece of music. It's a shame really, cos Dio's vocals are as ever stratospheric, but it noodles around its own tabard and tights for too long.
For me, this is the end of Rainbow, as after this Dio left for an invigorating stint in Black Sabbath. From here on in Rainbow created albums that lacked the atmosphere and epic sound that gave them their musical identity to begin with. More than anything, it demonstrates that they were really Dio's band than Blackmore's. It also sounds like they struggle on some of these songs, with the compositions veering from the unforgettable to the throwaway. Still, nobody else ever really sounded like this, and for better or worse they opened up a whole new avenue of macho, armour-plated heavy metal to act as the soundtrack to a decade of guys pumping iron and/or playing D&D. I doubt both avenues were explore by the same people.
This is the last real Rainbow album. Check it out if you like Deep Purple, Iron Maiden or, err, Manowar. Though I've just realised this last sentence is completely redundant, as if you like those bands then you will already own this, and I doubt it will be of interest to anyone else.
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