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(More customer reviews)It's a good album, folks. Mind you, I'm totally easy to please when it comes to AC/DC. I embrace their all-sound-same style and just look for relatively solid execution. But Black Ice is probably their best release since Fly on the Wall (which is under rated, IMHO). Let me expound. The production on Black Ice is everything a hard rock record should have. Every instrument sounds through the mix clearly. The snare sounds awesome. The guitars sound awesome, which power amp distortion that gets gritty when they push it, but cleans up when they play lightly. Seriously, it has less "distortion" than pretty much any album in the Brian Johnson era but still sounds heavy. The mix is NOT brick wall limited at all, and you can hear/feel the dynamics in the guitar playing so that when they back off, your ears get the break they need just like a live performance. Also, they showed enough restraint in the low end EQ that even when I crank my stock car stereo up the bass doesn't flub out. And after listening to ten songs cranked way up, my ears aren't worn out by loudness-wars pummel like on so many records today. It's probably mixed "loud" relative to '70's records, but shows a lot more dynamics than nearly any heavy music coming out nowadays.
And Brian Johnson sounds really good! Really good. Probably the best since Flick of the Switch, once again. I don't know what physical work he's done on his voice, but he's lost the about-to-die strain I could hear on Stiff Upper Lip. They keep him in the middle of the mix rather than out front, but that works well. He's not buried in the mix like on Fly on the Wall.
Angus plays slide on one tune, which I first thought would be gimmicky when I read about it, but really works great. Sounds awesome. Williams and Rudd sound great, per usual, with Williams bass given a slightly more prominent role. He plays eighth note pumps on virtually every tune, over Rudd's straigh on 4/4 beats. The rhythms are very much allsoundsame, however, if you're looking for something to criticize. The beats, tempos, and that eigth note bass line are pretty predictable. But it's AC/DC after all.
There really aren't any filler tunes on the album either. Every song rocks really well. And unlike their last five albums or so, Johnson's voice doesn't grate on me after listening to five or six songs straight through. Every song is about a seven, eight or nine on a ten scale. On the flip side, I'm not sure which song is a ten on a ten scale, making the choice of radio single less than obvious. But, again, all the songs are at least a seven, so there's no point in the album where the energy gets sucked out. The band is incredibly tight. I know it's a studio album so maybe that's a "duh" statement. But they play together so tightly throughout, which is part of their signature sound. It also makes their sound really predictable, along with the predictable rhythms as mentioned above.
Lyrically, there's not much going on here. Most of the sexual innuendo of their '70's and '80's albums is gone now, which is probably a good thing after tunes like "Cover You in Oil" and "Stiff Upper Lip" made it seem to me that they were trying too damned hard (no pun). The songs are mostly about rocking or about being loud or whatever. Often it's "Whatever" as I'm not sure I could pass a content test about the lyrical content at this point. The Young brothers wrote the lyrics again, as they have done the past several albums. I will say that they haven't written any really stupid lyrics on Black Ice, which is a nice change from the last few albums which all had a couple songs that made you think "WTF?" about the lyrics.
In summary, there's no new ground broken here, which won't surprise anyone. But the production is absolutely awesome, Johnson sounds better than he has a right to, and the band is playing tight as a drum. I may be a dinosaur, but AC/DC still has a unique sound to me that I'm not getting from a lot of new groups. In fact, with so many bands like The Sword copying Black Sabbath so faithfully, I wonder why there aren't more bands stealing from the AC/DC formula. You have Buck Cherry and a couple others, but still no band sounds like AC/DC. I expected this album to sound like Stiff Upper Lip, which was ok but not great. But Black Ice sounds way better than Stiff Upper Lip.
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Black Ice is the first full-length studio album of all-new material from AC/DC since the release of "Stiff Upper Lip" in 2000. Produced by Brendan O'Brien at the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, BC, Black Ice premieres 15 new AC/DC compositions and performances including the album's first single, "Rock 'N' Roll Train".
