Blow Up Your Video (1988)
1. Heatseeker
2. That's The Way I Want to Rock 'N' Roll
3. Mean Streak
4. Go Zone
5. Kissin' Dynamite
6. Nick of Time
7. Some Sin For Nothing
8. Rough Stuff
9. Two's Up
10.This Means War
By 1988, the rock landscape had changed. The fire that once scorched through Highway to Hell and Back in Black had dimmed to embers, at least in the public eye. AC/DC, once kings of the arena, had become somewhat passé – their sonic formula dismissed by critics as repetitive and their image eclipsed by the flash and polish of MTV. Blow Up Your Video arrived, then, not as a revolution, but as a reminder. A reminder that rock and roll, when done right, doesn’t need reinvention. Just guts, riffs, and swagger.
Reuniting with their early producers Harry Vanda and George Young, AC/DC made a deliberate attempt to reset the dial. And while the result doesn’t quite return to the primal grit of Powerage or Let There Be Rock, it does shimmer with a raw, rejuvenated energy. There’s an immediacy to this album that makes it far more vital than many give it credit for. Yes, the production leans on the glossy side – a concession to the late ’80s perhaps – but underneath the sheen lies a batch of songs that are among the most compulsively listenable of the Brian Johnson era.
The opening salvo is, frankly, superb. Heatseeker blasts out of the gate with all the brash confidence of a band who’ve nothing to prove – and yet somehow feel like they do. It’s a barnstormer of a track, unfairly relegated to the margins of the AC/DC catalogue. Following swiftly is That’s the Way I Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll, a tune as straight-ahead as its title suggests. Somewhere between Chuck Berry and Led Zeppelin, it rumbles with purpose – urgent, lean, and tailor-made for the stage.
The album’s midsection is equally impressive. Two’s Up might be one of the most overlooked gems in their discography – a track that combines melodic restraint with pounding bravado. Rough Stuff and Go Zone are equally convincing, each chiseled from the same granite as the band’s early classics, albeit with a polished finish.
Of course, not everything lands. Mean Streak veers too far into cartoonish bravado – a testosterone-soaked misfire that lacks the charm of its more finely tuned siblings. And Some Sin for Nuthin’? A rare stumble – a track that tries for lyrical depth but ends up sounding more like a half-hearted wink than a meaningful jab. Still, the failures here are mild and infrequent.
What Blow Up Your Video proves – and proves well – is that AC/DC were never meant to be trendy. They exist in a genre all their own: loud, loose, and defiantly primal. For those willing to tune out the noise of fashion and remember why they fell in love with rock and roll in the first place, this album is an unexpected delight. Not just a return to form, but a reminder that the form itself still mattered.
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