140. AC/DC / Blow Up Your Video. 1988. 2.5/5

Growing up as a teenager in Australia during the 1980’s, you didn’t have much choice but to be exposed to AC/DC on most music fronts. They weren’t the only Aussie band of course, but they covered most lovers of music. The major downside of this was that AC/DC did not tour Australia after 1981 for many years, which to the fans which considered them hometown heroes was a needle of concern. And beyond that, their albums were solid without being outstanding. It became the time when the phrase was coined that stated every AC/DC album was the same, just with a change of lyrics and a different solo. In some ways that wasn’t untrue, as the band settled into the style where if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And it meant that although the band still sold albums, their profile was probably not as large as it had been in the years leading up to 1981.
This was somewhat rectified by the release of the “Who Made Who” album in 1986, which was the soundtrack album of Stephen King’s “Maximum Overdrive” album. It was basically a compilation album of past hits, apart from three new songs, one of which was the title track, and a song that recaptured the world’s attention both through the song itself and the music video it produced. It revived memories of the hits from the “Back in Black” album, and gave the band a jump in popularity and sales that was perhaps just what they needed.
This then led into the recording of their new album. After having had ‘Mutt’ Lange as producer of the aforementioned “Back in Black” and “For Those About to Rock” albums, the band, mainly through Malcolm and Angus Young, had produced the next two albums themselves, something that in some sections of fandom had been blamed for the less than startling array of typical AC/DC songs coming out. Whether or not this was the case, for “Blow Up Your Video”, the band went ‘back to the past’, and brought in their long term producers and collaborators Harry Vanda and George Young to take the reins once again. So this time, there were to be no excuses. The lead track “Heatseeker” was released a week before the album, and it too provided an impetus for the fans to flock into the stores and get the new album on its release, all hoping that this would be the album that brought back the REAL AC/DC and their music.

Of course, you know what you get with AC/DC and an AC/DC album, but having started the album so well with "Heatseeker" and "That's The Way I Wanna Rock 'N' Roll", the rest does give the impression of being up and down average fare. Even these two opening songs, with their big videos and massive airplay, sometimes come across as being very formula-driven hard rock tracks. To me at the time of the album’s release, their perceived popularity came more from the fact that they heralded that first Australian tour in forever, and this cashed in on that market. They're not bad songs but they aren't from the top shelf either. But they are the best known tracks from the album.
From this point on, there are some songs that have merit, and others that you would almost have to categorise as filler, which for a band as revered as AC/DC is a terrible thing to have to say. If you want hard rock songs with a solid rhythmic base that satisfies all of the basic musical elements, topped off with vocals over the top that tend to sing along without a huge influence, and the occasional guitar solo that quite frankly rarely manages to disturb the furniture in its volume or originality, then you can find all of that here. The fast pace of the opening two tracks tends to bite hard on the following tracks “Meanstreak” and “Go Zone”, because it highlights their mid-tempo pace that seems dominated by Johnson’s vocals keeping the band in the time he wants to sing. From kicking off the album to set itself apart from both “Fly on the Wall” and “Flick of the Switch”, it falls back into the same traps those albums come with. That tempo picks up a little with “Kissin’ Dynamite”, and along with “Some Sin for Nuthin” and “Ruff Stuff” they are all within that framework of what had become the atypical AC/DC sound.
One song that does not fill this role is “Two’s Up”, which is, for the time, a rather modern kind of song that AC/DC hadn’t done in the Brian Johnson era. It is a song that, at the time the album was released, I was a bit nonplussed about. However, in the modern day, with more years under my belt, I think it measures up much better than I imagined.
On the plus side of the album, I really like “Nick of Time”, a terrific song that is well undervalued in the AC/DC catalogue. I still believe that this song is the fore runner to the songs the band produced for their next release. And the closing track “This Means War” is at the kind of tempo that makes the band’s best songs, and I recall thinking at the time that the album is bookended by hard fast tracks that highlights the softness of the middle.

I really wanted to love this album when it came out. “Who Made Who” had come out previously and re-whetted our appetites for classic AC/DC material, and when this album was released, it was fired up by the two single releases. There was great hope that this would be the return of AC/DC as a megaforce. On those first listens, it just didn't grab me at all. But the band was touring Australia for the first time in seven years, and so I gave it spin after spin to force myself to love it. I was lucky enough to see the band from the second row live in Sydney a few weeks later, and they were amazingly awesome. Such then, for an album that contains two of the band's most recognisable songs of the 80's on it, this still came across somewhat of a disappointment. It is possible that the live concert killed off the studio version of the band for me in this instance. They played four songs off this album live – pretty much the four I would have chosen as well – and they remain arguably the best. The album then returned to my shelves and was ignored, mostly because I was now beginning to build what has become my whole collection, and it fell into the background.
I have taken it out a couple of times since, mainly just as a passing regard to it being from the era it is. For the last couple of weeks though it has been back on the stereo in the Metal Cavern, and I must say that I have enjoyed it more than I ever remember. I’m not so stung by the sameness of those songs through the middle, and reminded of the excellence of songs like “Nick of Time” and “This Means War”.
In regards to the complete AC/DC discography, this one is unlikely to find a way into your top ten list. Maybe I’m wrong, but there are a lot better albums out there. As a snapshot of the era though, where AC/DC returned to their homeland and began to climb back to their peak when it came to live shows (and studio albums as their next release would attest) it is still an album that brings back a lot of memories of the time, and for those of us who were out and about in those heady days of 1988, most of those memories are worth reliving.