For those still rocking on, we salute you
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A couple of the core members are gone, but Angus Young is still rocking like a naughty schoolboy.
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THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):
ROCK
AC/DC
Rock or Bust (Albert)
***1/2
OUR mood always dictates how we receive music. So when the Brisbane storm hit about 30 minutes after I got the new AC/DC album and I was crawling in traffic with no rear windscreen, smashed rear vision mirror and 10cm of water sploshing about in the spare wheel compartment, the simple pleasures of the band sounded like welcome relief from reality.
That came as a surprise to me, since I would usually no sooner put on an AC/DC album than go for a walk in a Brisbane hailstorm.
I can’t speak for other listeners, but the back story behind the making of an album often speaks to me too. While AC/DC is usually a closed shop about that kind of information, Rock or Bust was recorded in a period of raw emotion, just as Back in Black was in 1980 after the death of Bon Scott.
To lose Malcolm Young as he succumbs to dementia is a bitter blow: his rhythm guitar and songwriting is just as much a part of the band’s DNA as little brother Angus’s contribution. So nephew Steve Young, 58, steps into the breach: he last covered for Malcolm on a tour in 1988. And it doesn’t seem to alter the sound of the band at all. How could that be?
Perhaps it’s because the sound of AC/DC is so unchanging, like some vast face carved in a cliff face, winking at us, that the role is absolutely defined before you play a note.
And so, as always, AC/DC find a way to carry on, through tragedy, errant and possibly illegal drummer behaviour, whatever life can throw at them. Welded-on fans will celebrate a triumph against the odds, and even casual observers will recognise a cracking rock song when they hear one. Rock or Bust has more of those than AC/DC have assembled in one place for years, decades possibly.
Best of the bunch is the title tune, every ingredient of the AC/DC brew delivered just right, from the teasing opening chords, to the inexorable thud of the bass and drums in lock-step and Brian Johnson’s broken-glass rasp (“In rock we trust, it’s rock or bust’’). As ever, you sense what every note of Angus’s bluesy solo will be before it arrives. Play Ball and the shouty-chorus of Rock the Blues Away are almost as good as the opener, and that opening trio of songs wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Highway to Hell.
Then something happens no one was expecting: the song quality doesn’t fade, puns such as Miss Adventureand Emission Control notwithstanding. The smuttiness of old is kept to a minimum too, although strip clubs worldwide will be playing Sweet Candy on repeat.
We don’t really know what Steve Young’s role is in all of this but the crunchy riffs on Baptism By Fire and Emission Control and the Led Zep-ish blast of Rock the House (think Black Dog) feel like something fresh without messing with the essential AC/DC-ness of it all.
Somehow they achieve what would be seemingly impossible after 17 albums or so: they make the whole thing sound exciting again, not just going through the motions.
AC/DC at their best were a great rock’n’roll singles band. Rock Or Bust is like a jukebox stacked with them.
Noel Mengel
ORCHESTRAL
AUSTRALIAN BRANDENBURG ORCHESTRA & CHOIR
A Celtic Christmas (ABC Classics)
***1/2
THE variety of impeccably performed music by Australian Brandenburg Orchestra & Choir, directed by Paul Dyer, is a big plus in this program. It opens with Alice Chance’s arrangement of O Thou who Camest from Above by Samuel and Charles Wesley with a captivating renaissance bagpipe introduction. Familiar fare such as Over the Rainbow, White Christmas (Berlin), Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful feature among the less familiar, such as Orlando Gibbon’s Hosanna to the Son of David, Scottish fiddlers in party mood playing When She Came Ben She Bobbed and Gilliam Callum. The Irish music and English text of Wexford Carol features countertenor Maximilian Riebl, a soloist throughout the program. Traditional Welsh carol Suo Gan, traditional Irish Is Fada Liom Uaim Si, arranged and played on saxophone by Christina Leonard, and Santa Baby, a Santa wish list, take Christmas music in an engaging direction. My Dancing Day is well realised although phony applause after each item detracts from the beauty of the whole.
Patricia Kelly
Grabbed Me By the Heart by The Acfields
FOLK
THE ACFIELDS
The Acfields (Independent)
***1/2
SOMETIMES two heads are better than one. So it proves for siblings Dan and Hannah Acfield, from Rockhampton via Brisbane, who were initially intent on pursuing solo careers. Their musical pairing was considered a side project, but this debut album suggests a more enduring partnership. While they make folk-pop with mostly acoustic instruments, the alternating lead vocals and the harmony blend creates something more distinctive. The results are easy on the ear, but a song like Lighthouse, with its vocal gymnastics and rolling rhythm, adds up to something more than just another pretty folk tune. Grabbed Me By the Heart starts off like a pearl discovered in a musty book of trad folk favourites, but the power in the vocals soon takes it more in the direction of, say, Neil Finn. Perfect Morning also feels like something from folk’s golden ‘60s era, while The Years is the story of a couple’s life together, lifted up by one of their strongest melodies. And the closing Green Mazda
shows they can tell a humorous tale too.
Noel Mengel
ROCK
THE NEW BASEMENT TAPES
Lost on the River (Harvest)
***
USING the Basement Tapes name suggests something different to what you get, with the clean lines of modern recording to the fore rather than the mercurial, off-the-cuff spirit of the fabled 1967 sessions by Bob Dylan and The Band, recently reassessed in Dylan’s Bootleg series. Still, the best of these new songs using Dylan lyrics written at that time have enough merit to warrant the project. Marcus Mumford, Elvis Costello, Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) and Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops) do the honours with the texts. Spanish Mary is in the form of a traditional folk tale and given a suitable setting by Giddens, rather like Steeleye Span covering Bob, no bad thing. Costello’s delivery doesn’t work so well, but once you get past wondering what Dylan would have made with the best of these lines, it becomes a pleasant exercise as well as a reminder to check out more Dawes and Carolina Chocolate Drops. But if you’ve got the money, why go past the original?
Noel Mengel
REISSUE
KISS
Love Gun (Deluxe Edition) (Mercury)
***1/2
THIS 1977 release may forever be in the shadow of the previous year’s Destroyer — widely considered the best KISS album — but it still has some claims to fame of its own. It was the last original studio album of KISS’s “classic rock” era, before what many saw as a downward spiral into disco and hair metal. And it was the last full album on which all original members played, as Peter Criss was replaced by ghost drummer Anton Fig on the next two albums before his eventual departure. Now comes this deluxe edition of Love Gun which, while not remixed from scratch like last year’s “resurrected” version of Destroyer, boasts a grab-bag of bonus material on top of the remastered original set. There are several demos — most interestingly two tracks that didn’t make the final cut — and one in which singer-songwriter Paul Stanley takes the band through the key changes in the title track. There’s also a seven-minute radio interview with Gene Simmons from back in the day. But none of this is essential except to the most ardent members of the KISS Army.
John O’Brien
CLASSICAL
PETER SCULTHORPE
Peter Sculthorpe 1929-2014: The ABC Recordings (ABC Classics)
****1/2
COMPOSER Peter Sculthorpe’s music spoke directly to the land, people and sprit of Australia. It was also coloured by Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific zone as shown in this treasure trove of 10 CDs and DVD. Sculthorpe weaves searing, scorched soundscapes around didgeridoo in Earth Cry recorded in Brisbane in 2003, Sculthorpe present, with Michael Christie conducting Queensland Symphony Orchestra. It is impossible to enumerate all items here but among them, titles such as From Tabuh Tabuhan Music for Bali, The Fifth Continent (Sculthorpe speaking), Music For Japan tell their own tales. No mere added extra, the DVD is integral to the whole. To see and hear Sculthorpe chatting, joking and remembering adds an extraordinary dimension to the crisp, committed playing of his string quartet samples by Goldner String Quartet (Queensland’s Dene Olding, Dimity Hall, violins, Irina Morozova, viola, Julian Smiles, cello). A gritty, engaging finale, 76 minutes of essential viewing of this major Australian voice of the 20th and 21st centuries, not long before Sculthorpe’s death.
Patricia Kelly
SOUL
ARETHA FRANKLIN
Aretha Franklin Sings the Old Diva Classics (Sony)
**
Although perhaps not the classics you were expecting. Rather than going over the evergreens suggested by the title, soul giant Franklin wraps her pipes around songs from Etta James’s At Last to Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Midnight Train to Georgia and Adele’s Rolling in the Deep.
Does Franklin still have the voice to pull off the demands of a song like Adele’s? Certainly. But this is also a reunion with producer Clive Davis, who signed Franklin to Arista for her highly polished R & B makeover of the ’80s. So we get a lot of bell, whistles and programmed drums when surely 99 out of 100 fans would want to hear a return to earthy R & B with suitably funky small band. So Midnight Train sounds modern and digital and I Will Survive is seemingly taken at too fast a tempo. It’s a long way removed from I Say a Little Prayer. There is a nice gospel-reggae version of Alicia Keys’s
No One, although the soul-jazz-and-scat version of Nothing Compares 2 U is, to put it mildly, ill-advised. Franklin’s still got the voice. Just let her use it!
Noel Mengel
