AC/DC

AC/DC
Family Jewels
(FMR)

AC/DC are like masturbation. A guilty pleasure, but perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of. Or so I'm told. Actually, they're more like the soundtrack to your life, the show band that played the anthems at those seminal moments of your glorious, misspent youth. Or maybe... I should stop stretching metaphors until they break. But what can you say about AC/DC that's useful and illuminating? What can you say about a brick that's useful and illuminating? And AC/DC are like a brick - solid, prosaic, useful, unfussy, and having a long term effect on your cranium. Not so much in common with onanism or an OST to your adolescence then, more like a slab of baked clay. And that's saying something. And there are forty such bricks here, all neatly stacked on 2 discs, covering the lengthy tenure of these little Aussie battlers. Well, 1975 to 1990 anyways. No extras, just that classic high voltage rock'n'roll. It's all here - 'T.N.T'., 'Let There Be Rock', 'Highway To Hell', 'Back In Black', 'For Those About to Rock', 'Shake Your Foundations', 'Thunderstruck', you know how the riff goes. But did you know that the boys had some of the worst, most badly aged videos in existence? Well you do now, and they're all here in their hideous splendour, including the unfortunate Fly On The Wall home video - five themed clips that are irredeemably cringe worthy. But who cares, when there's a whole disc of Bon Scott treasures, and the early stuff with Brian Johnson. And if the visuals get too much to take, just turn the fuckin' telly off and listen to the music.

Gavin Bertram.