For Those About To Rock We Salute You (1981)

For Those About To Rock We Salute You (1981)

In 2012, the concept of “a New Jersey” (named for the Bon Jovi album) was discussed on the message board I Love Music. To qualify, an album must:

• be the follow-up to a huge, possibly career-defining record

• have fewer and/or smaller hits than the band’s previous album or hits based more on momentum than appeal

• bring with it the feeling that the next record (if there is one) will see the bottom fall out, relatively speaking

For Those About To Rock We Salute You ticks every one of those boxes. Recorded in Paris following the success of Back In Black, it was their final album with “Mutt” Lange behind the boards, and while it has the same epic sound as its predecessor, the songs just aren’t there. Do you even remember what the first single, “Let’s Get It Up,” sounds like without clicking over to YouTube? The title track, released as the second single in early 1982, is a classic hard rock anthem, despite being performed at a slow marching tempo. There’s a reason they’re still closing shows with it to this day, and it’s not just because it’s hard to follow cannons.

There’s really not a single great — or even very good — song on the rest of the album. “I Put The Finger On You” is lyrically crude even for them, and melodically/rhythmically stock, with a terrible chorus; “Let’s Get It Up,” as implied above, is totally forgettable; “Inject The Venom” is too slow by half, coming off less menacing than tired; “Snowballed” tries, and fails, to do the fast-verse/slow-chorus thing they’d made work on “Walk All Over You,” from Highway To Hell; “Evil Walks” should have been called “Evil Lies Down For A Nap”; “C.O.D” sounds like Kiss were brought in for the backing vocals; “Breaking The Rules” and “Night Of The Long Knives” are so dull I can’t even come up with insults for them; and “Spellbound” trudges the whole thing to a halt. Basically, this is an album composed almost entirely of midtempo-or-slower tracks, with only two (“I Put The Finger On You” and “Snowballed”) mustering any real energy. And yet, almost entirely due to momentum created by the success of Back In Black, it was AC/DC’s first #1 album in America, and ultimately went quadruple platinum.