AC/DC didn’t completely disappear between 1990’s The Razors Edge and 1995’s Ballbreaker; they put out a mammoth live set and recorded the non-album track “Big Gun” for the soundtrack to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Last Action Hero. And apparently they really liked working with Rick Rubin on the song (which was pretty good, ridiculous video aside), because when they decided to make a whole new album, he was their pick to produce.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get the Rick Rubin who’d produced Danzig’s first four albums or Slayer’s trilogy of classics (Reign In Blood, South Of Heaven, Seasons In The Abyss); they got the Rick Rubin who’d produced Johnny Cash’s American Recordings and Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. Put simply, Ballbreaker — despite its title, and songs with names like “Hard As A Rock,” “Cover You In Oil,” and “Caught With Your Pants Down” — is as close as AC/DC has ever gotten to releasing a mature, adult album. And it’s as boring as that makes it sound.

It’s a long album — 11 songs in 50 minutes, with only one of them (“Love Bomb”) less than four minutes long, and three (“The Honey Roll,” “Burnin’ Alive,” and “Hail Caesar”) that pass the five-minute mark — and it feels longer. Now, in the past, when an AC/DC song got to be five or six minutes long, it was usually because they’d worked up such a head of steam, were boogieing so hard and at such relentless fury, that they just couldn’t stop without letting Angus rip through one more frantic guitar solo. Here, it’s because the sluggish blues grooves they’re plodding through won’t let them finish up in a reasonable amount of time. And it didn’t have to be this way. After all, Ballbreaker was the album on which original drummer Phil Rudd returned to the lineup after 12 years away. This should have been their opportunity to let it rip, to crank it up and slam it home like 1977 all over again. But instead, they decided to slow down and groove in a head-nodding, rather than headbanging, manner. The result is as close to a bummer as any AC/DC album can be.