Let me get this out of the way: this is the best AC/DC track since “Thunderstruck” and I am fucking psyched. I don’t know how it happened, because this is a serious retread, even by AC/DC standards. It opens like “Highway to Hell,” but without the rhythmic interest: Angus alone, riff out, and with a snare hit on four the drums enter. The chorus is paint-by-numbers, with Brian Johnson adding some embellishment around a big group vocal. It’s called “Rock ‘n Roll Train” and the refrain runs “you know she’s just like a runaway train (runnin’ right off the tracks).” Sounds like shit, right? Head on over to acdc.com and prepare to be amazed.

Another apparent liability is the presence of producer Brendan O’Brien, who with great pomp and no circumstance has razed several of Springsteen’s best attempts (and one of Neil Young’s, via Pearl Jam) at latter-day triumphs. And though O’Brien has made three Incubus albums I would kiss him on the mouth for making AC/DC bad-ass again. For the first time in decades, the Young brothers have a guitar sound that stands alongside, not cops to, their previous work. The drums are full and sharp, front and center in the mix where they need to be. Malcom is in the right channel, Angus is in the left, and Brian Johnson has lost an octave and a half without missing a step.

Of course, if you’re not already on board after thirty years, this won’t convert you. It’s still gleefully campy idiot-rock with nonsensical lyrics vaguely detailing a misogynist stereotype, some kind of angel/devil southern belle who’s hot to trot. I have no account for their politics, and for those of you who need more intellectualism than the band who made “Big Balls” typically provides, I’ll call you when they make Kid A. But those aboard know AC/DC’s brand of bad rock is inimitable, and the brothers still tread (shred?) where Jet and Airbourne can’t.

The elder-statesman-of-rock victory lap, replete with classic rock chartings and return-to-form pronouncements, is an industry constant, and though it’s true that this is one such return I venture that the hype has truth at the heart: this is an AC/DC more vigorous and present in the world than any of its contemporaries. Whether it’s O’Brien’s nostalgia or Angus Young’s self-overcoming will that did it, I am thankful as fuck that something split time in two, grabbed the skull-faced giant named “World-Conquering Ambition” and yolked it to a band who have little to gain and nothing to prove.

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