ACCEPT — Balls to the Wall (review)

ACCEPT — Balls to the Wall album cover Album · 1983 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
Balls to the Wall finds Accept pulling off a masterpiece of what I like to think of as "anthem metal" - metal with strong, punchy lyrics that seem to be crafted for crowds to chant along to. Accept's major influence on this front is Judas Priest, but here they match Priest at their own game, and at the same time aren't afraid to tackle subject matter which at the time was decidedly risky by presenting sympathetic takes on oft-overlooked subcultures. London Leatherboys is supposedly not so much about the gay scene as bikers - Love Child, however, is about sexuality and gender questioning and all that, topics which some quarters of metal still seem reluctant to address (and some in the scene are actively hostile to) to this day.

Despite taking on subjects that the conventional wisdom at the time might have thought were commercial suicide, Accept instead made this one of their biggest successes, and it's not hard to see why - where the material isn't quite as fast as aggressive as the previous two albums, it makes up for it by being infectiously catchy. It isn't quite as much to my taste, since the whole "anthem metal" approach tends to leave me a little cold and I feel like it suffers after repeated listens a bit more than Restless & Wild or Breaker do, but I respect what they're doing here.
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