Who Made Who (1986)
1. Who Made Who
2. You Shook Me All Night Long
3. D.T.
4. Sink the Pink
5. Ride On
6. Hells Bells
7. Shake Your Foundations
8. Chase the Ace
9. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)
A bit of a departure in terms of what classifies this as an “album”. Mainly, this is not a new AC/DC album featuring all new songs. This is a soundtrack to a movie called “Maximum Overdrive” that apparently was quite the dud. It was based on a Stephen King short story, and King was a fan of AC/DC. So…..
There are three new songs here. One is the title cut, and the other two are instrumentals. The title cut was actually a reasonably successful single and music video. The instrumentals are well done, but really don’t serve any lasting purpose. My guess is they were used as background ambience at some point during the film (like most, I never saw it). The guys are ever so slightly experimenting with synthesized songs. If you could call it a sin, it’s a very minor one. Other than the somewhat electronic drum beat, and heavily layered vocals on the chorus, the rest of the music on the new songs is pure AC/DC. It must have been quite a breath of fresh air that the song was well received, as the band was quietly fading into oblivion by this point. The fact that they would still be together 30 years in the future almost obscures such a fact, but at the time, they were quickly becoming yesterday’s news.
So what do you fill the rest of the album with, if you only have three songs? Well, two of the songs featured here are from last year’s disastrous Fly on the Wall. Fortunately, the two songs are among that album’s strongest, Sink the Pink and Shake the Foundation. What’s further enlightening (yet somewhat depressing at the same time) is that these two songs were remixed (or redone, or whatever) and sound so much better than the way they sounded on the original album. Enlightening because two very good songs finally got the treatment they deserved. Frustrating because it was now very obvious that the entire Fly on the Wall album should have received the same treatment all along. There really is a big difference
The rest of the album is a bit of a hodge-podge. They reach deeper in their catalog for some of their more popular songs. A decent move, but for whatever reason, the songs don’t seem to flow that well. Especially the inclusion of the best known slow “ballad-ish” song from the Bon Scott era, Ride On. To further disrupt the flow, this song is the only thing here from the Bon Scott days, which makes it even more out of place. So the whole album sounds a bit thrown together, but it was nice to hear some good, new material, and even nicer to hear some redone mediocre material. It served its purpose, and it probably generated some attention to a lackluster film that badly needed something to draw attention to it. You can’t help but wonder if it could have been done a bit better though.
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