HIGH VOLTAGE was the first chance America had to glimpse the raw power of Australia's best hard rock outfit. From their earliest days, lead guitarist Angus Young, a spastic dwarf-like riff-monger who wore nothing but traditional schoolboy attire, led this band of hooligans with gleeful perversity and balls-out ambition. The group's intent is perfectly clear from the disc's opening power chords: to distill rock and mutate the blues down to its barest essentials in a pulverizing whomp. Riding over the top of the battering rhythm section is the all-too-true sneer of vocalist Bon Scott, who brings sexist anthems to a previously unachieved high (or low, depending on your reference point).

With over-the-top show-stoppers about gonorrhea ("The Jack"), HIGH VOLTAGE is not for the faint of heart. The single from this record, "T.N.T," got AC/DC into rock radio rotation and gave metal fans a template of the brand of molten lava the band would later weld into perfection. The formula for which the group would eventually become famous--songs based around three crunching power chords and the high-pitched squeal of a man who sounds like he's just been unleashed from the reformatory--is firmly established here.