AC/DC
High Voltage

THE REVIEW

The other afternoon it was raining. It was raining, as it has been for more than ten days in this crazy and annoying March, which doesn’t give us a break nor lets us be free from its wanting to do as it pleases. I found myself alone at home, with nothing to do, and my mind was increasingly tending to get lost in the depths of the most extreme idleness, that excessive kind, the kind of doing nothing that makes you feel guilty. To avoid falling into this emotional maze, I decided to dust off some of my old CDs, some of my first listens, those uninterested, immature, almost absent ones that you initially don’t internalize as you should; pre-adolescence listens, in short. Thus, my mind, which was first eager for hateful laziness (of which, alas, I often fall victim), now is veiled by the thirst for memory, the need for nostalgia.

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While around me my friends let themselves be fooled by odious remixes of Gabry Ponte (if I now think that he even remixed "Geordie," it makes me want to fish him out and cause him harm!), pop music of the lowest level, and saccharine dispensers of “love” in all forms, I was discovering the electric group, the human surges: AC/DC. It is certainly not, as is well known, a group famous for having spanned across many diverse genres, nor a group too devoted to experimentation, but despite that, unlike many, in their various CDs I have always found them differently the same ("Some say we have thirteen albums and that they all sound the same. That's not true. We have fourteen albums that all sound the same" Angus Young). Of course, it would be exaggerated to say that between one CD and another there are great and visible differences or sudden changes in direction, but nonetheless, their unique style sometimes delights me. Their rock is rudimentary, bare, taken from the deepest and dirtiest roots of the blues, made of scales and stories: it is a painting and tearing of metallic, electric, loaded, and rock sounds. Rock, in the full and original sense of the term, devoid of contaminations, of complementary little signatures: rock, and that's it. And to my ear, I must say, after listening that varies from Queen to Pink Floyd, from De Andrè to Janis Joplin, from Robert Johnson to Genesis, and much more, it is enjoyable every so often to immerse oneself in a warm and charged style of simplicity and immediacy, perhaps banal after repeated consecutive listens, but very powerful in the moment. AC/DC should be listened to in periods, after long pauses, only when you truly desire simplicity, of a bare but strong guitar, of a bare amplifier, of a hoarse, angry voice, a scratch of vocal cords (I prefer Bon Scott, by the way).

A bit immature, but completely full of these factors is their debut album "High Voltage", high tension (of which I own the international version, different from the one they released only in Australia). This album is the game, the disengagement, sex drugs, and much rock'n'roll, with descents into electric blues and ascents of a still newborn heavy within the arms of daddy Rock. Certainly, like all debut records, it's not perfect nor too linear, but it already presents all those characteristics that this group will go forward with, even after Bon Scott decided to join the victims of that rock that swirled in his throat and decided to stay there, forever. The title of the record perfectly reflects the progression of an album that seems to come out from the power sockets of the room where you are, certainly not better than later records (see "Highway to Hell"), but already with that right theatrical rage, a fake rage, the rage of every pure rocker, the revolution, the desire to not care, just for the whim, for the fun, for rock!... Angus Young (whom I find an excellent guitarist and frontman) is the true mind of this naked rock: it is he who lets himself be pierced and shocked by the high tension, and it is he who, as charged by electricity, lets his hands go, crazily, on the guitar also bare; bare, like a woman waiting to be touched, on a bed, naked. Angus is like a man thirsty for sex who throws himself on this provoking hussy, with the difference that he never quenches his thirst for rock, and the caresses on his Gibson become slaps of rock, from which the guitar does not die, quite the opposite.

Why, you may ask, have I chosen this certainly not outstanding record over others that followed???.... Because it is immature, as I feel immature, and it is of a rock (I repeat it again, to the point of nausea!) wonderfully empty of everything except energy, as I feel. It is a record that, at this time, represents me, as if it had sought me out itself. Because when I was thirsty for memories, I found myself ahead of records far more important in the famous (only to me) history of my past. Records that I love more than this one, groups that I love more than this one, deeper, more solemn, more important emotions. Yet the choice fell on this one, as if I had been sucked into high voltage, into the energy, into the desire for rock. Because in the end, I don’t want to have time only for depth, for solemnity, for great and mandatory value: there are moments when I feel too at the root of myself, empty, and then only the simplest and most strongly immediate rock can fill, with disengagement and play, this emptiness and set me back on my bones when my mind, as I said, votes for numbness.

And so, what do you want, I threw myself in, let myself be taken, shocked. And then I put it back there, where it was, next to the others of this group. We will probably meet again when they decide to call me, when they know it’s the right time.