Accept - Metal Heart

It is very easy to find some humor in Accept. Lead vocalist Udo Dirkschneider sounds like he has raked a Brillo pad across his larynx, which is cool if the band you are fronting is a metal band and Accept is definitely a metal band. Then, you see him, a little chubby dude with close-cropped hair and sporting a camouflage outfit and all of the seriousness that Accept tries to throw out is completely gone. Watching Udo work takes a lot of energy just to stifle your giggles.
Many years have passed since I’d heard the band’s sixth album, Metal Heart, but I remember considering it as a very good record and, perhaps, the band’s highpoint. After listening to it again, I now must admit that I could have been wrong about such high praise.
It starts with the epic title track, a song so fucking brutal that it actually fades all of the other instruments out of the mix for the Wolf Hoffman guitar solo and it still manages to sound hugely important. “Metal Heart” is a testament to how great Accept could be while it also manages to set the bar too high for any of the subsequent songs on the album to reach.
Part of the problem is that the rest of the album doesn’t attempt to reach the heights of the title track. Instead, they try to reach the heights of the mainstream metal audience that they first tasted with their last album, Balls To The Wall. There was nothing compromised on that album and, essentially, they were fooling themselves if they thought that by incorporating a few additional melodic moments they’d be able to climb up the charts. If there were any doubts that they’d be able to become household metal names, just re-read the first paragraph again to find out why they couldn’t be.
To facilitate their ill-advised commercial assault on America, Accept enlisted Scorpions producer Dieter Dirks to oversee Metal Heart with the hopes that he’d be able to introduce the same commercial appeal he provided the Scorps. The thing is, the Scorpions write songs about partying, pussying, and rocking. Accept writes songs about the apocalypse, oppression and malcontent. Not a winning formula for radio and we already saw the band’s un-photogenic appeal from the video to “Balls To The Wall.”
But for every bit of gloss and melody that Dirks’ helped create, he also brought a dramatic production quality, which does work in some songs (see the title track, the eerily claustrophobic “Dogs On Leads,” the Wagner-esque “Teach Us To Survive,” and the operatically overdubbed male vocals on the closer “Bound To Fail”).
Accept works best when they shoot for these types of grandiose arrangements instead of worrying about increasing their record sales. Who knows if it was the record company that thought they’d be able to sell metal songs fronted by a little man with a raped larynx to the general public, but my guess is that they would have done just fine following their own fairly unconventional direction.