Published on Dec 31, 1998
Heavy metal… testosterone… loud, crunching guitars…
screams like someone got their nuts trapped in the car door. I love
it – I discovered it when I was in high school, and I’ve always,
somewhere in my heart, carried a torch for this kind of music.
So why am I not impressed with
Balls To The Wall from German metallers Accept? Quite
possibly because there’s not enough fancy guitar work and too much
screaming from lead throat Udo Dirkschneider.
Granted, this album turned out to be the one that broke Accept
in America, though they’d never reach the level of superstardom
that their fellow German band Scorpions did in their heyday. Cuts
like “London Leatherboys” and the title track were the kinds of
songs that you’d put on just as your dad came home from work just
to piss him off. And, there’s no denying that when Accept –
Dirkschneider, guitarists Wolf Hoffmann and Hermann Frank, bassist
Peter Baltes and drummer Stefan Kaufmann – were firing on all
cylinders, their music was great.
But two or three good songs (I’d count “Turn Me On” among the
hidden classics) just don’t make an album stand out as being
exceptional, and much of
Balls To The Wall falls short due to the songwriting. Tracks
like “Losers And Winners” are poor attempts to capture some of the
glory of other tracks on the album, while others like “Fight It
Back” and “Love Child” just fall short of the goal.
Two other problems plague this album. First, Hoffmann is an
exceptional guitarist, but this album doesn’t seem to give him the
chance to show the six-string flair that he has. Second, while
Dirkschneider is a powerful screamer, often his vocals are rendered
unintelligible in the cacophany. (I’ll concede that English is not
his native tongue, and he seems to handle it well – especially on
the spoken bridge on “Balls To The Wall”.)
This isn’t to say that
Balls To The Wall is a bad album; I’ve listened to it on and
off for the better part of two months here in the Pierce Memorial
Archives trying to pass a fair judgment on it. But in the end, I
know deep in my heart that Accept was capable of much better… and
the bulk of
Balls To The Wall isn’t an example of this.