AC/DC – High Voltage

Yeah the mix it’s pretty flat with rather poorly defined low end, including drums, but give em a break. This is early AC/DC and budgets were probably low, plus you had basically a bar band in the studio, recording everything together and in one take. The pub band vibe just spews off this record in its rawest most basic form. Appreciate it for what it is. A chronical of an up and coming band. Listen to early UFO records. It’s the same thing. They eventually got more money and consequently better production. I mean “You got my picture on the wall next Gary Glitter”. Cmon. That’s who AC/DC was at the time.

Wow! Some mediocre reviews on this record below, This is classic AC/DC imo , raw n dirty, dont miss out on this classic!

a great early AC/DC album, tarnished by less than stellar sound quality and production. The bass is non existent (it's not very prominent on most AC/DC albums, but you literally can't hear it at all on this album), the drums are akin to muffled cardboard, and the entire album just seems thin and muddy, in comparison with their heavy and polished later albums, sound wise. Pressing is great, and Porky makes a respectable effort to make this album sound good.

In 1976, these Aussie rockers were on their way to the big time. This early-ish release has a few goodies and really solidifies the sound that defined pre-Brian Johnson AC/DC.
I had this record as a kid in the early '80s, but I lent it out and it never returned. Was happy to find a clean copy of an older pressing.

The mix is not great, it's pretty muddy and instruments are not well defined, but I do not believe that's a problem of the pressing, but just the way the band sounded then.

Not the finest album of the Bon Scott era of the band by a long shot. Though I do love the bagpipes that slow build to a smashing crescendo by the end of "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)" -- a song that's not just an AC/DC classic but a signature standard of hard rock. The rest of the album I've found to be too slow tempo for my taste, not enough bombast, lacking the raw, crunchier, freewheeling frenetic guitar riffs of more accomplished records like Let There Be Rock or Powerage. I don't dislike High Voltage, it's just not one I'm prone to leave on from start to finish, but I'll listen to the bagpipes and to "Live Wire" or "Can I Sit Next to You, Girl?" any freaking day of the week, or everyday, and never grow tired of them, which is going on thirty years for me now, since the time I bought the lp at Licorice Pizza in the Lakewood Mall. "She's Got Balls" is just plain lame, and "TNT" doesn't do it for me, even though that's the song that still seems to get the most classic rock airplay these days. Solid debut, however, as none of the songs are outright bad, even though a handful are embarrassingly banal and a couple rather bland. Bon Scott's now legendary wit as a lyricist hadn't quite arrived. Not consistently, song by song. He wasn't as clever as he was crass, though that would change significantly by the bands next release the following year, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976). The band's immaturity showed in lead schoolboy/guitarist, Angus Young, too, as he was maybe just too damn young (he was fifteen at the time of the record's first Australian release) to have conjured up the snarling stylings of a later "Riff Raff" or "Down Payment Blues".