Accept – Too Mean To Die
Release Date: 29th January 2021
Label: Nuclear Blast
Pre-Order/Stream
Genre: Heavy Metal
FFO: Judas Priest, Saxon, Metallica.
Review By: Ken Love
Cards on the table. I love Accept. I believe that 2010’s ‘Blood of the Nations’, like Alice in Chains’ ‘Black Gives Way to Blue’ or Faith No More’s ‘Sol Invictus’, is one of the all-time great comeback records in the annals of hard rock. It is a literal masterclass in traditional metal. When I first heard that album it gave me a charge that I can’t explain. The record combines every single thing I love about heavy metal in one glorious metallic package. It’s bursting with wicked riffs that have so much bravado they would woo your wife & daughter in front of your face, and they’re so fucking great you wouldn’t care either. Producer Andy Sneap resurrected the band with that album, his weighty production job bringing a density and crunch to the guitars that fit this band like a tailored suit. For me, Accept (particularly Accept 2.0) have the sonic heft of Metallica, the euphoric twin guitar play of Judas Priest while vocalist Mark Tornillo draws more than a few comparisons to Brian Johnson in his timbre. They’re just an awesome metal band.
Accept albums post ‘Blood of the Nations’ have been a subtle case of diminishing marginal returns; 2012’s ‘Stalingrad’ was genuinely superb, 2014’s Blind Rage’ is really strong though peppered with filler, while 2017’s ‘The Rise of Chaos’ had just a tad more filler than its predecessor. This leads us onto the newest album ‘Too Mean to Die’, the band’s 16th record – their 5th with Tornillo – and which boasts an almost entirely revised line up from ‘Blood of the Nations’ with only Tornillo and founding guitarist, Wolf Hoffman remaining.
In short, if you enjoy the fundamentals of Accept you will enjoy ‘Too Mean to Die’. Let me start with the positives, and there are many of them. If you love exciting traditional metal riffs, as well as searing melodic guitars, that are as tasteful as they are memorable then you will be in paradise here. As with most Accept records, almost every song on this record features moments of guitar playing that will make your jaw hit your shoes, given there are 3 guitarists in the band, one being the legendary Wolf Hoffman, this is hardly a shock. Guitars are front and centre. There is a moment in rousing opener ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ where the solo moves into a melodic bridge that is simply euphoric, the kind of musical passage that would have you grabbing a stranger and punching the air when it was played in a live show. Similarly, the riff that opens the title track is NWOBHM 1-0-1, a riff that, while you’ve heard it a million times, is such fun & metal reduced to its nucleus that it’s wonderful. One of the most fun moments on the record is the fantastic ‘Overnight Sensation’, an anthemic boisterous sing-a-long like the bands classic ‘Living For Tonight’ from 1985’s ‘Metal Heart’. Lyrically it’s along the same theme as ‘Analog Man’ from ‘The Rise of Chaos’; Tornillo espousing about the vacuous nature of internet celebrity & social media influencers. It is not a song of this era, it’s drawn directly from the 80s with a modern sheen, and is guaranteed to make you bop and strut as it bounces along. The one two of ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’ and ‘How Do We Sleep at Night’ are great; the former really showcasing Mark Tornillo’s vocal range while the latter reflects symphonic grandeur of the likes of ‘Stalingrad’.
The only negative points here are the propensity that the band have to sleepwalk into filler material; and those filler tracks almost always feature some of the more questionable lyrical content too. Tracks like ‘No Ones Master’, ‘Sucks to Be You’ & ‘Not My Problem’, while not bad songs, do have somewhat juvenile verging on cringey lyrics and come across as Accept by numbers. They’re decent, just not as great as Accept can be when they’re firing on all cylinders.
Accept are easily one of the most under-rated classic metal bands; they are the band that wrote one of the earliest speed metal songs (1982’s Fast as a Shark) and, if you have never heard Blood of the Nations, I could not implore you more to get it. It’s a genuine classic. Too Mean to Die is good, and when it’s good it’s awesome, however it does slightly suffer from the band’s tendency to churn out inferior versions of material they perfected earlier in their career. All that said, if you are a fan of classic metal there is still lots to love here.
(3.5 / 5)
