Black Ice
| AC/DC
Black Ice
Black Ice is the 15th studio album by Australian hard rock band AC/DC. It was the band's fourteenth internationally released studio album and the fifteenth in Australia. Released internationally on 17 October 2008, it was produced by Brendan O'Brien. It marked the band's first original recordings since 2000's Stiff Upper Lip, with the eight-year gap being the longest between AC/DC's successive studio albums. Black Ice has the longest running time of any AC/DC studio album.
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
AC/DC offer a vision of the Stones if Keith had won every argument: no concept albums, no keyboards, no disco, no ballads, no gospel choirs. And Black Ice is their best argument in years — maybe decades — that evolution is for suckers.
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Conquest of Sound
From the long hard highways of hell to the delivering ear shattering thunderous live performances, the band lives on for a good time. With the quintet’s fifteenth release Black Ice, the group delivers some of the old classic sound with some of the new stuff. In their own words “It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock n’ roll!”
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Metal Storm
Sure this is not the best album that the band has ever done but this is a really good album of Hard Rock which simply lacks of thundering songs like "Let There Be Rock" (but hey they're not so young now!).
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Louder
Black Ice is too long and too reliant on the mid-tempo verse-chorus rockers that had become AC/DC’s default setting. However, with eight much better than decent tracks it had a higher strike rate than any AC/DC album since For Those About to Rock… in 1981. It proved to be their most successful record since then too. Released on October 20 2008, it rocketed to No. 1 in 29 countries and had shipped six million copies by the end of that year.
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Uncut
As Black Ice begins, with the straightforwardly excellent “Rock’n’Roll Train”, it seems O’Brien has been hired to reproduce the elemental thud of AC/DC’s early ‘80s pomp – something more monolithic than the enjoyably rapacious blues-rock of 2000’s Stiff Upper Lip. Soon, though, O’Brien’s task seems larger – and doubtless, to plenty of AC/DC loyalists, more sinister.
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BBC
Yes, they're greyer, slightly slower and slightly less convincing as the animals they used to be, but AC/DC have once more ensured that, for fans, this Christmas will be a very black one indeed.
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Sputnikmusic
Black Ice is better than it had any right to be, and certainly better than anyone could expect from AC/DC in 2009. At least three-fourths of the album are pretty strong, and even the (rather dire) filler manages not to grate so much after a few listens. While I won’t be shouting to the Heavens the way I did when I heard Death Magnetic, I’m certainly glad my favourite band is back with a rather strong and dignified outing.
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AllMusic
AC/DC haven't lost their knack for great, simple rock & roll and Black Ice is graced by a few terrific tracks. In fact, as it opens with the "Highway to Hell" boogie of "Rock N Roll Train," the stuttering "Skies on Fire" and "Big Jack," it seems that Black Ice might be the great latter-day AC/DC record the group has yet to deliver, but as the next 12 tracks spool out over the next hour, the album slowly slides into a too-comfortable groove, fueled by too-tight rhythms and guitars that sound loud but not beefy.
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PopMatters
But the primary reason that Black Ice is AC/DC's best album since Back in Black is the strength of the material. With eight years since 2000's Stiff Upper Lip to craft hooks and melodies, Angus and Malcolm Young have delivered a strong set of 15 songs that includes at least three or four classic tracks. The American film director Howard Hawks once described a great movie as having "three great scenes and no bad ones". By that criteria, AC/DC have delivered a great album.
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Paste
Johnson’s leathery shriek of a voice has surely seen better days, and no, there are no new ideas here (nor have there been in the three-plus decades the quintet have thrived and survived together), but this is all totally beside the point for the band’s millions of supporters and aficionados: for these Aussie mischief-makers it’s always been about riffs, tiffs and spliffs, and in that regard, Black Ice succeeds on every level imaginable. And for that, AC/DC, we salute you
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The Guardian
Black Ice delivers not just songs called Rock 'N' Roll Dream and She Likes Rock 'N Roll, but one called Rock 'N Roll Train as well: a veritable bumper harvest. If there isn't actually a song with "balls" in the title, there is at least Big Jack, the titular hero of which can boast among his many attributes "a full sack". It's business as usual, and it's a brave or foolhardy soul who would bet against business being extremely brisk.
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