Heavy metal… testosterone… loud, crunching guitars…
\nscreams like someone got their nuts trapped in the car door. I love
\nit – I discovered it when I was in high school, and I’ve always,
\nsomewhere in my heart, carried a torch for this kind of music.<\/p>\n
So why am I not impressed with
\nBalls To The Wall<\/i> from German metallers Accept? Quite
\npossibly because there’s not enough fancy guitar work and too much
\nscreaming from lead throat Udo Dirkschneider.<\/p>\n
Granted, this album turned out to be the one that broke Accept
\nin America, though they’d never reach the level of superstardom
\nthat their fellow German band Scorpions did in their heyday. Cuts
\nlike “London Leatherboys” and the title track were the kinds of
\nsongs that you’d put on just as your dad came home from work just
\nto piss him off. And, there’s no denying that when Accept –
\nDirkschneider, guitarists Wolf Hoffmann and Hermann Frank, bassist
\nPeter Baltes and drummer Stefan Kaufmann – were firing on all
\ncylinders, their music was great.<\/p>\n
But two or three good songs (I’d count “Turn Me On” among the
\nhidden classics) just don’t make an album stand out as being
\nexceptional, and much of
\nBalls To The Wall<\/i> falls short due to the songwriting. Tracks
\nlike “Losers And Winners” are poor attempts to capture some of the
\nglory of other tracks on the album, while others like “Fight It
\nBack” and “Love Child” just fall short of the goal.<\/p>\n
Two other problems plague this album. First, Hoffmann is an
\nexceptional guitarist, but this album doesn’t seem to give him the
\nchance to show the six-string flair that he has. Second, while
\nDirkschneider is a powerful screamer, often his vocals are rendered
\nunintelligible in the cacophany. (I’ll concede that English is not
\nhis native tongue, and he seems to handle it well – especially on
\nthe spoken bridge on “Balls To The Wall”.)<\/p>\n
This isn’t to say that
\nBalls To The Wall<\/i> is a bad album; I’ve listened to it on and
\noff for the better part of two months here in the Pierce Memorial
\nArchives trying to pass a fair judgment on it. But in the end, I
\nknow deep in my heart that Accept was capable of much better… and
\nthe bulk of
\nBalls To The Wall<\/i> isn’t an example of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5941],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-36116","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-accept","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36116"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=36116"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=36116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}