For Those About to Rock We Salute You

This album is perhaps even better than Back In Black. Though we don't hear Brian Johnson's real voice. Every song on this album are good. Nothing to complain about, get this one now!

With For Those About To Rock, AC/DC took the screaming rhythm of Back in Black, evened it out, removed the overdone raunch, and ended up with the slickest album in their catalog. This is a tasty metal treat from beginning to end.

This is their second album with Brian Johnsen and he shines on this disc bringing the same soul shattering shriek that he brought to "Back in Black " , but better this is AC/DC at an ultimate peak in thier career . Angus and Malcolm Young bring a new and varied approach to fit their new singers style and while it isnt as intense as their Bon Scott era , or Back in Black is , their is still a sense of power in the way Phill Rudd plays( the last time an AC/DC drummer would play with force until 1990' s "The Razors Edge") but where has Cliff Williams gone?

AC/DC was either really burnt out from the success of Back in Black, surprised by the success, or just used up all their ideas for that album, because this follow-up album is lackluster in comparison.

The title song, with its loud, fierce guitar riff and soaring chorus is about the only worthwhile moment on the entire disc. The rest of the songs point to the rapid downward decrease in songwriting quality the band would find themselves in for the rest of the 80's decade. There's too many uninspiring moments on this album for me to really recommend a purchase. The last three or four songs don't sound any different from each other, and none of them unfortunately grab my interest in any way.

The band wasn't washed-up already though, since they would eventually come back hard and heavy in the early 90's and remind everyone just why they are the very best of all the simple hard rock bands that were ever formed. For a while though, they would just release one average album after another with some success along the way

OK, so the title track is a great song, cannons and all, and Inject the Venom and Put the Finger on You are both decent rockers. The rest, however, is the sign of a once-good band now simply sticking to the formula that brought them success. Consider the following: Virtually every song on For Those about to Rock We Salute You is a midtempo heavy rocker about sex. Virtually every song on Back in Black was a midtempo heavy rocker about sex. Same with Highway to Hell, and Powerage, and Let There Be Rock, and... well, pretty much every AC/DC album. But while those albums were great, this one sucks. Just look at some of the cliched song titles: Let's Get It Up, Evil Walks, Spellbound...

For Those About to Rock had all the ingredients for being a great AC/DC album. The band was riding the tremendous success of their landmark Back in Black album and still had wunderkind producer Mutt Lange in the recording booth to produce the follow up. Instead AC/DC runs out of gas on For Those About to Rock. New singer Brian Johnson performs well enough on vocals, but Angus Young appears to have exhausted his supply of great riffs. Except for the title track, the rest of the album is forgettable. The band sounds mediocre, certainly not up to the brilliance of the Highway to Hell or Back or Black albums. The songwriting is poor as well - predictable macho/metal lyrics without a trace of the humor that previous singer Bon Scott infused into AC/DC's earlier work. With this record, AC/DC began to sound less like the hard rock boogie band of legend, and more like a second rate 80's heavy metal outfit. The decline would continue through the Flick of the Switch and Fly on the Wall albums that followed.

Full Title - For Those About To Rock We Salute You. 2003 remastered reissue of 1981 album. Packaged in a digipak with 16 page color booklet containing all original album art, many unpublished photos, classic memorabilia and liner notes. Epic.

Lesser bands might have been put off their stride by the death of their lead singer, but not AC/DC. No sooner had Bon Scott met his whiskey-sodden end in 1980 than AC/DC recruited a new singer, Brian Johnson--who sounded almost exactly like Scott--and released, in Back in Black, the biggest-selling album of their career. For Those About to Rock...We Salute You is a suitably triumphant follow-up. The cannon-punctuated title track--the most auspicious marriage of music and artillery since Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture"--still provides a spectacular finale to AC/DC concerts. For Those About to Rock also confirmed that Johnson's lyrical preoccupations were broadly congruent with those of his predecessor: "Let's Get It Up" and "Inject the Venom" are as subtle as their titles sound. This is a record Beavis and Butthead would describe as "cool"--and, as usual, they'd be right. --Andrew Mueller