AC/DC HIGH VOLTAGE VINYL

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.