In fact, and this will undoubtedly be blasphemous to some, I don’t hear a radical shift between the two players. Bass player aficionados can best debate his appointment, but you won’t find me criticising Mark Evans the man he replaced. ![]() Of course, Powerage is more than one single man as it is also Cliff Williams’ first recording with AC/DC. ![]() While I acknowledge that I prefer Brian Johnson’s vocal style, and that leads me more to his side of the AC/DC catalogue, Bon Scott was an incredible vocalist in his own right and no more is that true than when listening to his searing vocals on songs such as Rock ’N’ Roll Damnation, Riff Raff, and Sin City. It’s as if it has been overshadowed by Highway To Hell, Back In Black, and Scott’s unfortunate passing in 1980.Īs a result, underrated, is likely the best way to describe Powerage for it’s a monster of an album but it just isn’t the one that everyone talks about, nor is it the album that you immediately think of when you think of AC/DC. Despite loving Highway To Hell, I may even go as far as declaring Powerage the best 70s release from AC/DC. Released in 1978, Powerage is the rock legend’s fifth studio album and is easily one of the best Bon Scott era recordings. Yet upon putting it on the turntable, I marvel at the sonic masterpiece before me and wonder just why I don’t seek Powerage out more often. And so they remained: proud, primitive, electric.As a longtime fan of AC/DC, I’ve been fortunate enough to collect all their releases, yet despite a massive back catalogue of music, there are some albums, such as Powerage that simply don’t get spun that often. “You can’t call an album Rock or Bust and then go bust,” Young joked about the band’s 2020 record. They survived not only the death of their first real singer (Bon Scott) and, later, of Angus’ brother, co-founder and co-writer Malcolm, but the hearing damage of Scott’s replacement, Brian Johnson. Albums such as 1979’s Highway to Hell and 1980’s Back in Black may have helped create heavy metal, but they also shared the minimalist attitude of punk: The songs were short, the chords simple, the spirit clear and uncompromising. “The real art,” Young said, “is making the complex simple.”įormed in Sydney, Australia, in 1973, the band presented a rebuttal to the bloat of art and progressive rock, but also restored the music to its roots in Little Richard, blues, and a kind of pre-Beatles notion that that rock music was primarily meant to entertain. Anyone could be complex-just put more junk into the pot. ![]() Young said that his older brother George, who had produced their first several albums, stressed the importance of making your point clear and never doing more than you need to. Where other 1970s hard rock bands digressed into concept albums and orchestral suites in tortured efforts to prove how smart they were, AC/DC treated their records the way a cobbler might treat a shoe, or a watchmaker a watch: as a humble craft to be refined through repetition, and always geared toward the utility of the final product. After all, by that point, they’d been around for more than 45 years, and had spent those years making more or less the same song. In a conversation with Apple Music in 2020, Angus Young, the guitarist and principal songwriter in AC/DC, mused on what he thought made the band tick.
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