Accept - Stalingrad

To admit to liking the German heavy metal band Accept requires an understanding that you’ll always end up defending the sheer ridiculous of the video to the band’s biggest stateside song, 1983’s “Balls To The Wall.” If the image of a short, chubby vocalist with short-cropped blonde hair and a penchant for camouflage isn’t enough to put your infatuation through easy ridicule, then the image of a dummy version of Udo Dirkschneider actually riding a wrecking ball as it slams into a fake wall of bricks should surely do the trick.

I make no effort to defend that video, only offering that the riff on “Balls To The Wall” is so awesome that most guitarists would gladly give their left testicle to come up with a guitar part as spectacular. I’d also add that Sebastian Bach was spot on when he declared “Udo Dirkschneider” as the most metal name in rock music.

Accept circa 2012 is not the same band as it was thirty years ago during the heyday when they could afford things like Styrofoam bricks, stuffed Udos and videos recorded in bullet time. Hell, Udo isn’t even in the band anymore and only two of the band’s original line up remains active: guitarist Wolf Hoffman and bassist Peter Baltes.

To put it bluntly, why should you even give a shit about Accept circa 2012? For most of you, you probably shouldn’t, but for anyone else who can appreciate the beauty of metal’s adhesion to the riff itself and admire the sheer power of a male chorus chanting in an ominous Wagnerian manner such phrases as “Hellfire!” “Hung, Drawn and Quartered!” and “Stalingrad!” then Accept’s 13^th offering is worth considering.

Stalingrad is the second record featuring former TT Quick vocalist Mark Tornillo as frontman. Tornillo possesses a larynx scraping vocal style that resembles Dirkschneider, but certain performances also demonstrate a greater range that’s similar to legendary British vocalist Graham Bonnet.

That’s fine for when the band makes a go of all the Accept songs that most fans will end up wanting during the subsequent tour, but it does nothing for the sake of the band’s relevance, seemingly two decades beyond their welcome.

Remarkably, guitarist Wolf Hoffman has put together a line-up and a set of songs that defy the perception of Accept beating a dead horse, making Stalingrad a legitimate contender in the metal community and a source of inspiration to anyone who isn’t quite ready to let their dreams die.

Hoffman unleashes 11 tracks of uncompromising Flying V action, and he does it with such ferocity that it sounds too good to be a second wind. He also catches everyone off guard with an entire concept album about the battle of Stalingrad that’s as heavy as the subject matter.

Utilizing the same epic approach found in many Power Metal bands, Accept is distinctively European even with Tornillo’s New Jersey heritage as the voice of their recent insurgence.

Much of the Stalingrad’s success comes at the hands of producer Andy Sneap, who presents each member with stunning clarity. He leant the same skills to Testament’s The Formation of Damnation and Megadeth’s recent releases, proving that he’s clearly adept at bringing old metal bands into the sonic landscape of the twenty-first century while retaining certain highlights of their catalog.

With Stalingrad, he’s helped renew Accept’s good fortunes, streamlining all of their talents into one tight package that suggests the band’s metal heart transplant is an overwhelming success.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Accept - Balls To The Wall

If you’ve ever seen the video for Accept’s “Balls To The Wall,” you know how ridiculous it is and how un-photogenic that lead singer Udo Dirkschneider is. There’s no way that these guys should have done a band video until after they had dominated the metal scene with their music.
Because their music is crushing, envelope pushing stuff with incredible riffs and a vocalist that not only features one of the best metal vocalists around, he was born with one of the best metal names ever.
Say it with me: Udo Dirkschneider.
Awesome.
Balls To The Wall is famous for a few things, the wonderful title track which ranks as one of the best heavy metal songs ever and for a few songs that may (or may not) be metal’s first overtly homosexual songs ever.
The lyricist for the band happened to be guitarist Wolf Hoffmann's wife, Gaby Hauke, and she consistently provided the band with weirdly themed material that seemed out of place for a metal band.
“London Leatherboys” sounds like it’s about the gay S&M subculture, but Hauke clarified that it was about a more metal topic of bikers. “Love Child,” she acknowledged, was about homosexuals, but that the theme was more about opression rather than sexual identity.
The cover art was singled out for its homoerotic image, and all of this seemed to be the focus of the band rather than how great the music was within. In addressing all of the accusations about homosexual things, Accept's guitarist Wolf Hoffmann seemed to grow frustrated with the topic, at one point declaring "You Americans are so uptight about this." while admonishing that it was a non issue in other parts of the world.
To that point, the title track of Balls To The Wall could be about dog raping robots and it would still rule. The rest of the album is just as heavy and just as catchy. It doesn't reinvent the wheel like the album before it (Restless and Wild) and it’s not as lofty as the album that followed it (Metal Heart), but it provided Middle America with an honest-to-goodness metal album that nearly destroyed anything else from that year and it continues to resonate as a timely metal document.
Just don’t let the video spoil that fact.

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.

Watch The Damned!

I don’t care what you think: Accept’s song “Balls To The Wall” is fucking awesome. It’s the video that nearly eliminated the song, and perhaps the band’s, credibility.
The notion that a short, fat, and ugly German leading a few additional ragtag Krauts behind him could possibly create one of the decade’s balls-out metal songs is pretty unbelievable.
But if you’re able to suppress the image of a cheap dummy riding a makeshift demolition ball into a Styrofoam wall, then you might actually hear the smart and brutal metal within.
Instead of subscribing to the formulaic metal themes, Accept decided to tackle a heady subject matter such as the oppressed rising up against the establishment
For them to actually make such an epic statement, the band had to enlist two important ingredients to make it work.
The first is the riff. Guitarist Jörg Fischer creates a memorable riff that it’s hard to remember what the solo sounds like. To remind you, it’s a brief and spastic series of quick trills and exploding rushes that is neither linear nor well thought out. Immediately before it folds on top of its own expectation, Fischer cuts the shit and begins riffing the memorable rhythm part over again.
Then, in an example of one of the best production tricks in all of metal, a chorus of Germaine bass and baritone vocals slowly rises up through the mix. It’s just a simple, repetitive “Ah ah ah,” but there’s so much reverb caked into the chanting that it sounds as massive as Hitler youth rally.
Lurking over everything else is Udo Dirkschneider, a vertically challenged, chubby dude with close-cropped blonde hair and a penchant for camouflage clothes.
Udo sounds utterly menacing, alternating between screams (“Watch the damned!”), hoarse whispers (“Make the world scared”) and primordial grunts. The way he matter-of-factly declares “Lets plug a bomb in everyone’s ass” was perfectly nihilistic and it worked nicely against a Ronald Reagan backdrop, and it works even better in the Bush II era.
It’s that video. That fucking retarded video. It completely erased every positive memory that you may have for the music and it happened to be the one format that most people remember the song from.
But give a chance to listen to it again, as loud as you can and witness how one of the most visually unappealing bands in metal made one of the most perfectly adorned song in metal.