As soon as the tour in support of For Those About To Rock We Salute You wound down, AC/DC headed back to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, where they’d recorded Back In Black, without producer “Mutt” Lange for the first time since 1979. They were handling this one themselves, and after the (artistically if not commercially) disappointing For Those About To Rock, it was the right decision.

Their shortest album, at 37:05, and sheathed in a cover that looks like a teenaged fan might have drawn it on his notebook during a boring class, Flick Of The Switch could easily have been another letdown. But it’s not. In fact, it’s a collection of 10 songs that fucking rock, some of them harder than any material the band had released to date with Brian Johnson up front.

The one thing that must be acknowledged is that lyrically, the record is pretty weak, with only one real exception. Johnson wrote some great stuff on Back In Black, but inspiration had apparently run dry by this point, because half these songs are seriously meaningless — strings of words that lead from verse to chorus without a single memorable line. The only song with any lyrical impact is “Bedlam In Belgium,” for the simple reason that it actually tells a story, albeit one that actually predated Johnson’s tenure with the band. The gig that turned into a riot was in Kontich, Belgium in October 1977, on the tour in support of Let There Be Rock, and you can read the full story, from someone who claims to have been there, right here.

Fortunately, the relatively weak lyrics are balanced out by some of the most ferocious riffing in the band’s ’80s catalog. AC/DC made a conscious effort to recapture the rawness of earlier albums here, and they pulled it off. Johnson is in the middle of the mix, on an equal plane with the Young brothers’ guitars and Phil Rudd’s drums (this would be his final album with the band until 1995, but it’s a hell of a sendoff), and the whole thing roars and slams from front to back. Some songs (“Deep In The Hole,” “Rising Power”) have the funky strut of “Back In Black,” while “Badlands” is stomping blues-rock, and “Landslide” and “Brain Shake” are as fast as classics like “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” or “Whole Lotta Rosie.”

One more caveat, though. While it’s tough to make these kinds of accusations in the realm of blues-based hard rock, where everybody’s working with the same chords and scales, “Landslide” sounds distressingly similar to Ted Nugent’s “Motor City Madhouse.” It’s not just a similar riff; the whole fast-picking thing Angus is doing is exactly what Nugent did on his song, in 1975. It feels like straight-up thievery to me. But what the hell — they make it their own, and the song rocks. (And in possible karmic payback, it sure seems like Whitesnake lifted the riff from “Badlands” for the chorus melody to “Slow An’ Easy,” from 1984’s Slide It In.)

AC/DC didn’t need to make a brilliant album after For Those About to Rock We Salute You, but they did need to make one that proved they could still kick ass. They did.