AC/DC got their start on the Australian bar circuit, and when you’re a bar band, you know lots of cover songs. So it’s no surprise that the Australian version of High Voltage, AC/DC’s debut album, kicks off with a furious take on “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” a blues first recorded by Big Joe Williams in 1935. Their version, unsurprisingly, is a speeded-up variation on Van Morrison and Them’s 1960s cover. (It’s unlikely they’d heard Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes’ 1967 recording.) This song almost certainly knocked drunk Aussie audiences on their asses. But as an album opener, it’s a weird, tentative choice, like the band weren’t confident in their own material yet. And High Voltage is a weird, tentative album. AC/DC weren’t themselves yet.

That was literally as well as figuratively true. When this album was made, the band proper only consisted of singer Bon Scott and guitarist brothers Angus and Malcolm Young. They had no rhythm section of their own, so another Young brother, George, handled bass, and some guy named Tony Currenti played the drums. Fortunately, Currenti never gets in the way of the boogie — he knows how to set up a minimalist, rock-steady groove and just sit there for as long as necessary.

Scott’s personality is the most instantly appealing element of the band’s sound as represented here. Malcolm Young’s rhythm guitar doesn’t have the razor-wire bite it would develop on the very next record, and Angus’s leads are fairly typical blues-rock, with just a little bit of noise here and there. But Scott was already who he would be for the six albums they made before his ugly, tragic death. He exhorts, he leers, he sneers, he tosses snarky asides at the end of lines. Despite not having a traditionally “good” voice (read: he wasn’t a post-Robert Plant screamer, and he sounded more like a criminal than a loverman), he was one of the most charismatic frontmen in rock.

Still, even Scott can’t make High Voltage a great album; it’s way too erratic and patchwork, with no great songs and only two that approach the power of their later work. The six and a half minute “Soul Stripper” has all the elements of ’70s AC/DC at their best — a supple groove that’s somewhere between boogie and disco, with an edge of real meanness to it; a lyric that blurs the line between lurid and vicious, with sexual attitudes that go beyond routine rock-dude boneheadedness and into genuinely creepy territory; and stinging lead guitar (by both Angus and Malcolm; for the one and only time in the band’s discography, they trade lines, and it’s pretty hot stuff). And speaking of creepy lyrics, give a close listen to the slow-crawling “Little Lover.” You’ll be sorry you did.

But the rest of the record finds them searching for their sound and heading down a number of blind alleys in the process. The chorus of “You Ain’t Got A Hold On Me” has a melody the Eagles wouldn’t have turned down. “Stick Around” is a plodding midtempo track any band of the time could have written in their sleep, and “Love Song” is a ballad(!) with keyboards(!!). Ultimately, the Australian version of High Voltage is for diehard fans only — if AC/DC were ever to release an actual best-of (their Iron Man 2 soundtrack doesn’t count), nothing here would make the cut.