Bactracks (2009)
Disc One
1. High Voltage
2. Stick Around
3. Love Song
4. It's a Long Way to the Top
(If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll)
5. Rocker
6. Fling Thing
7. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
8. Ain't No Fun (Waiting 'Round to be a Millionaire)
9. R.I.P. (Rock in Peace)
10.Carry Me Home
11.Crabsody in Blue
12.Cold Hearted Man
13.Who Made Who
14.Snake Eye
15.Borrowed Time
16.Down on the Borderline
17.Big Gun
18.Cyberspace
Disc Two
1. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (Live)
2. Dog Eat Dog (Live)
3. Live Wire (Live)
4. Shot Down in Flames (Live)
5. Back in Black(Live)
6. T.N.T.(Live)
7. Let There Be Rock(Live)
8. Guns For Hire(Live)
9. Sin City(Live)
10.Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution(Live)
11.This House is on Fire(Live)
12.You Shook Me All Night Long(Live)
13.Jailbreak(Live)
14.Shoot to Thrill(Live)
15.Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be(Live)
Disc Three
1. High Voltage(Live)
2. Hells Bells(Live)
3. Whole Lotta Rosie(Live)
4. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap(Live)
5. Highway to Hell(Live)
6. Back in Black(Live)
7. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)(Live)
8. Ballbreaker(Live)
9. Hard as a Rock(Live)
10.Dog Eat Dog(Live)
11.Hail Caesar(Live)
12.Whole Lotta Rosie(Live)
13.You Shook Me All Night Long(Live)
14.Safe in New York City(Live)
There’s something faintly disingenuous about the whole affair. Backtracks, a sprawling AC/DC box set, attempts to bridge the yawning gap between myth and marketing. Yet instead of cementing the band’s legacy, it merely underscores how thinly that legacy can be stretched.
Let’s begin with the Bon Scott material – a trove long thought depleted after 1997’s Bonfire box. At the time, the band solemnly insisted the vaults were dry. Now, suddenly, we're offered a fistful of unreleased Scott-era cuts. Were they holding back? Or scraping what's left from the studio floor? Sadly, the contents suggest the latter. These aren't forgotten gems – they're embryonic fragments, often rough sketches of later, better-realized tracks. Love Song, in particular, is an outright misstep: a saccharine detour into territory AC/DC had no business exploring. It's the sort of tune that should have remained mercifully buried in the vaults. One can only imagine the late Bon Scott shaking his head at its resurrection.
And this, really, is the problem. The Scott material here feels more like a curio cabinet than a treasure chest – interesting to the archivist, irrelevant to the casual fan. Any tracks of genuine power and grit – the kind that defined early AC/DC – had already found their way to the Bonfire collection. What’s left is filler dressed up in the emperor’s old leathers.
Moving into the Brian Johnson era, things improve. The selection of B-sides and rarities has more meat on its bones, and for once, the vault delivers. The sound is tighter, more assured, and even the lesser-known tracks radiate the slick menace that Johnson-era AC/DC perfected in the 1980s. Ironically, these discarded cuts often outclass much of the material on more recent studio albums like Black Ice, which, for all its production gloss, lacked the primal punch of earlier efforts. The unreleased tracks here are leaner, meaner, and unmistakably AC/DC.
The remainder of the box set – a sprawling collection of live performances from 1983 through 2000 – is both the crown jewel and the Achilles’ heel. The performances themselves are uniformly ferocious. If you’re seeking proof of AC/DC’s status as one of the great live bands, it’s all here: Angus duckwalking through thunderous riffs, Johnson screeching like a banshee at a boil. But the sequencing is baffling. Multiple versions of the same songs – Back in Black, Dog Eat Dog, and others – crop up again and again, each culled from different tours but sounding eerily similar. The casual listener will struggle to detect meaningful variation. For a band so rooted in primal repetition, the redundancy is doubly noticeable.
In the end, Backtracks is a padded celebration, a Frankenstein of leftovers stitched together to fill out the catalogue. About a third of it genuinely excites – the B-sides and select live cuts could stand alone as a lean, essential collection. The rest feels like label-directed excavation: unreleased for a reason, reissued for revenue. It’s a faint echo of the old AC/DC ethos – dirty deeds, done for corporate needs.
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