Various albums

Losing a singer should be fatal for a band. Often, the singer is what distinguishes the band, the noise that most clearly says "this is X". This is particularly true of bands that are really vehicles for the voice: you couldn't have a Eurythmics without Annie Lennox or a Police without Sting.

But of course some bands are capable of changing. A couple of posts ago, I mentioned A Certain Ratio, whose rather distinctive singer left. They became more funky, less punky. New Order, born out of the ashes of Joy Division, became pioneers in indie dance crossover, where Joy Division had been postpunk personified, and spawned goth (lots more about that when I get to the Js, trust me).

AC/DC also shifted, but they had already been making the shift. Losing Bon Scott just pushed the process along. Through most of the 70s, they had been what I suppose you could call a blues rock band, but had been getting heavier, more metally. This move continued after Scott died, and I think that, Back in black notwithstanding, they stopped being listenable.

I say Back in black notwithstanding because it's as good a heavy rock album as you're going to hear and probably AC/DC's best. Man, how good that would have been if Bon Scott had sung it! Where he had the edge over Brian Johnson is that his voice was more expressive, a leering monster's voice, with a lot more gravel and sauce. It's the voice of a man who intends to get into your pants by the end of the evening and will put everything into achieving it.

Still, this shift is fairly subtle, and the basic building blocks of AC/DC's sound have been the same for nearly thirty years. The rhythm section thumps out a solid boogie with mechanical precision, the rhythm guitar plays a tight, heavy line, and Angus is Angus. He fires out riffs and licks like they are going out of fashion, with an encyclopaedic coverage of blues and metal lines.

This sort of band, which ploughs a particular furrow album after album, can get tiresome, and I think they began to run low on creativity after Scott's demise, the music becoming less reliant on melody and more reliant on riffs that were progressively less hooky as they went on. The Scott albums though are great fun, and should be in your collection if you enjoy any sort of rock--download them and Back in black and you'll have all the AC/DC, indeed all the hard rock, you need. They're not as hard to love as most metal of the time because they are not pretentious or pofaced, and Angus, in his prime, had just a great feel for a hook.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:12 am