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Accept - Blood of the Nations

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 November 3 2010 at 06:11:59 PM



Transfusion unnecessary. 1970s, now so notably alien and utterly “analog,” must feel like a fucking Wikipedia entry to most. Barely can recall its latter half—Jaws and Star Wars, Gong Show, Jiffy Pop, neckties wider than my eight-year-old waist. Certainly don’t remember first Accept LP, birthed in Disco Decade’s death knell, “coy” art featuring Faye Dunaway stunt-double brandishing chainsaw nearly as big as she. Tunes therein as scattered and commonplace as the “femme fatale” imago. Thirty plus years later, founder Udo Dirkschneider ixnays idea of “reunion;” puts peroxide ‘n’ combat pants in vault; Mark Tornillo enters, presumably new blood to ailing corpus.

Frizzy-haired, bare-chested Tornillo waxes Bon Scott physicality, but bears vocal style not unlike Herr Dirkschneider’s. Tornillo still has stones to hit sleazy, night-hag howls Scott patented, and Brian Johnson finally made his own with the release of Back in Black. Tornillo’s good, sometimes great, but not even front-page news. Buried lede? An Udo-less Accept cranks out a full-length some 14 years after its last is fucking notable. That it’s good, sometimes really great, and shares likenesses not wholly in passing with some of the band’s most muscular work—Breaker, Restless & Wild, Balls to the Wall—shows (like this year’s exceptional efforts by Scorpions and Ratt) the band’s self-awareness verges on monkish. Accept thankfully favors extreme introversion in lieu of adapting to environs or copping to some lethal flirt with what-it-is-to-be “relevant” in an art climate where heinous quantity always already trumps ever-elusive quality.

Part New Age excavation, part good-intentioned exploitation; Blood of the Nations is yield of a band deft at identifying its own whatness and amplifying it to nearly offensive ends. Why Hoffmann and Frank haven’t riffed like this since Restless & Wild’s “Fast as a Shark” is anyone’s guess. They recycle the same proto-Speed Metal on the record’s opener, “Beat the Bastards,” which allows Tornillo to make quick statement: ‘We’re Metal. This is Metal. Enjoy or move on. Lest you be destroyed.’ Queue “Teutonic Terror,” an overgrown “Ahead of the Pack,” shamelessly featuring two-handed saw riffs, upfront bass ogling, lyrics romanticizing Germanic tribes’ blood ‘n’ thunder. “Locked and Loaded,” “Rolling Thunder,” “No Shelter” keep two feet perpetually on the gas. “Kill the Pain,” lone ballad here, rivals even Scorps’ finest manufactured lover’s angst: folksy ma’s meatballs strumming, raise-the-Bic vox, tears-on-tha-pillow solo to close ‘er out. There is a timeless naivety to the whole program—a once plentiful spirit now mostly squandered… a mindset desired by many, hated and misunderstood by more, harnessed by dwindling few.

Predictably, Blood of the Nations will be called cliché. It’ll be called campy, kitschy, and cheesy. It’ll be called so-bad-it’s-good. As legion tastemakers continue to rationalize praise for non-Heavy Metal acts as acceptance and appreciation for bands who’ve assimilated Heavy Metal tropes (despite falling very fucking far from that tree), bona fides Heavy Metal like Blood of the Nations becomes nauseatingly “other,” queerly novel in a time where pre-patched battle shrouds are eGay’d, and showgoers stand listless, gawking at artiste extraordinary Dennis Dread as he works at some alien neck ‘n’ head thingama someone once referred to as “headbanging.”

[Stewart Voegtlin]

Accept
Blood of the Nations
Nuclear Blast
2010

Comments (3)

  • 24 comments
    Dennis Dread
    5:15 PM on Nov 05, 2010 // reply »
    Ha! That Newdo sounds an awful lot like Udo doesn't he? Killer stuff. "Pounding Metal", as we old folk call it...
  • 34 comments
    David
    8:03 AM on Nov 10, 2010 // reply »
    Meet the Newdo, just like the Udo? Thank god it's not Menudo?
  • 386 comments
    VOEGTLIN
    8:35 AM on Nov 10, 2010 // reply »
    I need a POUNDING METAL patch with a WRECKING BALL motif to counteract all the FENRIZEAN SPEED METAL Drones.

    David: If you're a Mezcal drinker like me, you're well aware of the transformative powers of Menudo after a long night of boozing. Something about slow cooked bovine gut that "works."
 

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