Published on Mar 7, 1998
Just as heavy metal is making a comeback, one band is saying
their farewells… again.
Accept was one of, if not
the, name in German heavy metal in the ’80s. Led by the
hoarse balls-on-barbed-wire shouts of Udo Dirkschneider, Accept
slowly wormed their way into the hearts of metal fans with songs
like “Metal Heart,” “Balls To The Wall” and “Midnight Mover”. But
as the band started moving towards more melody-driven music,
Dirkschneider abandoned ship and started his own band, which failed
to go anywhere. Accept’s fortunes, meanwhile, got worse, and the
band threw in the towel in 1989, only to reunite a few years later
(and eventually reteam with Dirkschneider).
But for reasons unknown to me (translation: couldn’t find any
reason on the fan sites I could access), Accept has finally decided
that enough is enough, and have chosen to go out with a double live
album for the fans,
The Final Chapter. For a live album, this is good, but there
are times that one wonders what all the hype was about.
There’s no debating the talents of guitarist Wolf Hoffmann,
though I’d question if it was necessary for him to throw in
classical lines as lead breaks (at one point, he pulls out
Beethoven’s “Fur Elise”… which the crowd actually
sings to!). Bassist Peter Baltes gets his chance to strut
his stuff, but for the most part seems perfectly happy providing a
solid backbeat for the band. Drum chores are split on this disc
between Stefan Kaufmann and Stefan Schwarzmann.
And then there is Dirkschneider. There are times that his vocals
are more like nails on a blackboard than real vocals – whatever did
people hear in his performances? Be that as it may, his shrill
tones are what made Accept, and it’s only fitting that he be their
vocalist as the final gun sounds.
The track selection on
The Final Chapter truly indicates this is a present to the
fans, selecting cuts from the band’s whole career. The better-known
songs are here (“Balls To The Wall,” “Metal Heart,” “London
Leatherboys”), but for a fan who occasionally dabbled in their
music, there are many other tracks which will tickle their taste
buds as well. “I Don’t Wannt Be Like You,” “Bulletproof,” “Stone
Evil” and “Slaves To Metal” all are high points of this disc.
But there are times when it seems like the band is grapsing at
straws. “Princess Of The Dawn” might have been popular judging from
the crowd’s response to it, but the track doesn’t come over well in
the translation from live show to compact disc. (Memo to my friends
at CMC International: Are the words “home video” possibly in the
works?) “Son Of A Bitch” is a weak throwback to the mid-’80s, when
hard rock and heavy metal were challenged by the PMRC. I’m not
saying this was a response to the PMRC, but if it was, it was
hardly worth pumping out.
And there are times when this set seems to drag on endlessly –
by the time you get to the final track “Death Row,” chances are you
might have lost some interest by then. Maybe if some of the
instrumental noodling had been cut out of some of the tracks, it
would have been more bearable. (Let’s also thank Jah we weren’t
subjected to the dreaded “drum solo” track.)
The question has to be asked: Why now is Accept calling it
quits? My guess (and it’s just a guess): after almost 20 years,
they might have run out of creative steam, and wanted to go out of
the game without turning themselves into a caricature of who they
used to be.
There still are legions of Accept fans out there; for those
people,
The Final Chapter will be a must-own disc. For the rest of
us, it’s an interesting (if not a bit overindulgent) product to
listen to, and has many flashbacks of this band’s glory days. But
it’s better taken in small doses – one disc per sitting,
perhaps.