AC/DC, at its best, makes you feel like championing fun: be it via booze, blow, high-speed driving or three-way fucking. On Black Ice, the Aussie outfit reclaims its status as king of good times. The band is back swinging — heavy and hard — in a way that percolates the pelvic region and vaporizes inhibitions.
The disc erupts on Track 1 with the refreshingly ferocious “Rock ‘N Roll Train,” which, with its killer Angus Young guitar riff, assured Brian Johnson-doing-Bon-Scott-shriek and sing along chorus, would sit well next to the best of Highway to Hell or Back in Black cuts — no small feat, for sure.
Much more for the better than the worse, the band follows the same time-honored, terrifically predictable formula for the rest of the record. There is one exception, toward the end of the full-length. Angus busts out some savage slide playing on “Stormy May Day” that’s straight from the Jimmy Page playbook.
Unoriginal? Yeah. Maybe. So? What fool decided it necessary to complicate a style of music named after screwing? AC/DC may be the smartest rock band of all time — they figured out what moves people and stuck with it. And that, like fucking, is what life is all about. 4 (out of 5) stars.
