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Title: AC/DC "Black Ice" Review: Best Effort Since "Back in Black"
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URL Source: http://acdctour2008-2009.blogspot.c ... -review-best-effort-since.html
Published: Oct 24, 2008
Author: David Higgins
Post Date: 2008-10-24 17:57:51 by Old Friend
Keywords: None
Views: 128
Comments: 3
The Verdict on AC/DC's New Album Australian Rockers AC/DC have delivered their best album in decades based on a sample of tracks from the upcoming Album "Black Ice" The songs – Anything Goes, War Machine, Stormy May Day, She Likes Rock N Roll, Money Made and Black Ice, along with the current single Rock N’ Roll Train – suggest the band has made a remarkable return to form after a series of fan-only albums in recent years. Judging by these songs, the 15-track album is the band’s most consistent and accessible release since Back in Black. Anything Goes has the potential to be the band’s biggest hit since You Shook Me All Night Long if released - under one plan - as a second single. Opening with a guitar sound that recalls Bon Scott’s bagpipes in Long Way to the Top, Anything Goes is a delicious 1970s tune with blood-pumping, 2008 production values. The Young brothers would disagree, but it is the closest thing to a pop song the band has done and will pull in many new fans. The songs heard today draw from periods throughout the band’s career. Black Ice is a head-banging anthem from the For Those About to Rock era, with a riff as good as any the Youngs have written. War Machine is a hard and fast affair reminiscent of Back in Black’s Given The Dog a Bone. Money Made is a bass-heavy boogie with guitar chords that seem to hang back, teasing, before sling-shotting into a chorus from the Blow Up Your Video era. Stormy May Day offers something new - a huge over-driven slide guitar hook that is a favourite in the Alberts studio. Producer Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, The Offspring) and long-time AC/DC mixer Mike Fraser should take a major credit for the album, delivering a very contemporary sound -- probably the best production value of any AC/DC album to date. The vocals are one of the big surprises of the album. In a modern medical miracle, front man Brian Johnson’s vocal chords have patched themselves up to deliver his best vocal performance since the 1980s. O’Brien has also worked hard on the back-up vocals, which makes a tremendous difference in the choruses. This is not Back in Black. It won’t sell the 45 million copies of the 1980 classic. But on a first listen it is by far the best thing AC/DC has produced in a quarter of a century. * Black Ice is due out in Australia on October 18 and around the world on October 20.
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#1. To: Dakmar (#0)
Here are a couple of my favorites off the new CD She Likes Rock N Roll Anything Goes
AC/DC album not hurt by downloads Mathew Ingram, today at 4:44 PM EDT * Post a comment * Skip to the latest comment * Back to the blog The legendary British rock band AC/DC is one of the few holdouts when it comes to selling music through the iTunes record store, a stand the group has taken in part because it refuses to sell individual songs as singles -- "We don't make singles, we make albums," says guitarist Angus Young -- and Apple won't let the band restrict its iTunes sales to just albums. That's why its new album, Black Ice, is exclusively being sold through Wal-Mart stores, and it may also have something to do with the fact that the record has been topping the BitTorrent download charts as well. According to TorrentFreak, just five days after the album was leaked on BitTorrent it had already been downloaded 400,000 times. Download-tracking firm Big Champagne said that in the first week it was available (the leak occurred on October 7, and the official release was on October 20) it was being downloaded about 100,000 times a day. If that rate continued -- and there's no reason to think that it hasn't -- then the album was downloaded more than a million times before it went on sale. Has that affected physical sales of the record? There are only a couple of days worth of statistics to go on, and those are estimates, but it doesn't appear to have hurt CD sales through Wal-Mart. According to Billboard magazine, sources said that close to 200,000 copies of Black Ice sold on the first day alone, and music-industry tip sheet Hits Daily Double said that based on first and second-day sales, the album could sell as many as 800,000 copies in its first week. That would make the record the biggest seller for record label Sony BMG in more than two years. Demand for AC/DC's music no doubt has something to do with the fact that the band -- which HAS SOLD MORE ALBUMS THAN ANYONE BUT THE BEATLES -- hasn't released a new record in about eight years. But it's interesting to see that almost a million illegal downloads of Black Ice doesn't seem to have hampered sales of the physical product at all. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081024.WBmingram20081024164414/WBStory/WBmingram
There is no honor in bending one's knee to the banking elites that are robbing the children you claim to love of their future. Soon they'll convince those very same children that you deserve to be eliminated ... and they may be right.
#2. To: All (#0)
#3. To: Old Friend (#0)
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