HIGH VOLTAGE

This is a Hyper CD, which contains regular audio tracks and also provides a link to the artist's website with the help of a web browser. AC/DC: Bon Scott (voclas); Malcolm Young, Angus Young (guitar); Mark Evans (bass); Phil Rudd (drums). The 2003 edition of HIGH VOLTAGE includes liner notes by Murray Engelheart. All tracks have been digitally remastered. Personnel: Bon Scott (vocals); Malcolm Young, Angus Young (guitar); Phil Rudd (drums). Audio Remasterer: Ted Jensen. Liner Note Author: Murray Engleheart. Recording information: 11/1974. Photographers: Dick Barnatt; Erica Echenberg; Colin Stead; Michael Putland; Philip Morris. HIGH VOLTAGE was the first chance America had to glimpse the raw power of Australia's best hard rock outfit. From their earliest days, lead guitarist Angus Young, a spastic dwarf-like riff-monger who wore nothing but traditional schoolboy attire, led this band of hooligans with gleeful perversity and balls-out ambition. The group's intent is perfectly clear from the disc's opening power chords: to distill rock and mutate the blues down to its barest essentials in a pulverizing whomp. Riding over the top of the battering rhythm section is the all-too-true sneer of vocalist Bon Scott, who brings sexist anthems to a previously unachieved high (or low, depending on your reference point). With over-the-top show-stoppers about gonorrhea ("The Jack"), HIGH VOLTAGE is not for the faint of heart. The single from this record, "T.N.T," got AC/DC into rock radio rotation and gave metal fans a template of the brand of molten lava the band would later weld into perfection. The formula for which the group would eventually become famous--songs based around three crunching power chords and the high-pitched squeal of a man who sounds like he's just been unleashed from the reformatory--is firmly established here.