Of course,
Highway to Hell is the final album
AC/DC recorded with
Bon Scott, the lead singer who provided the group with a fair share of its signature sleaze. Just months after its release,
Scott literally partied himself to death (the official cause cited as acute alcohol poisoning) after a night of drinking, a rock & roll fatality that took no imagination to predict. In light of his passing, it's hard not to see
Highway to Hell as a last testament of sorts, being that it was his last work and all, and if
Scott was going to go out in a blaze of glory, this certainly was the way to do it. This is a veritable rogue's gallery of deviance, from cheerfully clumsy sex talk and drinking anthems to general outlandish behavior. It's tempting to say that
Scott might have been prescient about his end -- or to see the title track as ominous in the wake of his death -- trying to spill it all out on paper, but it's more accurate to say that the ride had just gotten very fast and very wild for
AC/DC, and he was simply flying high. After all, it wasn't just
Scott who reached a new peak on
Highway to Hell; so did the Young brothers, crafting their monster riffs into full-fledged, undeniable songs. This is their best set of songs yet, from the incessant, intoxicating boogie of "Girls Got Rhythm" to "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)." Some of the credit should also go to Robert John "Mutt" Lange, who gives the album a precision and magnitude that the Vanda & Young LPs lacked in their grimy charm. Filtered through Mutt's mixing board,
AC/DC has never sounded so enormous, and they've never had such great songs, and they had never delivered an album as singularly bone-crunching or classic as this until now. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine