Accept's Too Mean To Die: It’s still balls-to-the-wall, man

Battle-hardened veterans Accept are still going at it with astonishing intensity on Too Mean To Die

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Accept: Too Mean To Die
(Image: © Nuclear Blast)

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1982 was surely the greatest year ever for German heavy metal, with the Scorpions’ breakthrough album Blackout, followed by Accept’s Restless And Wild on which the young pretenders’ proto-thrash onslaught Fast As A Shark really put the ‘manic’ in ‘Germanic’. And battle-hardened veterans Accept are still going at it with astonishing intensity.

Produced by current Judas Priest guitarist Andy Sneap, Too Mean To Die is Accept’s sixteenth studio album, their fifth with American singer Mark Tornillo, and the first with Martin Motnik on bass and Philip Shouse as part of a three-guitar attack alongside Uwe Lulis and totemic founder member Wolf Hoffmann.

On head-banging anthems – Zombie Apocalypse frenetic, The Undertaker grindingly slow – Tornillo growls and shrieks like his predecessor Udo Dirkschneider. 

The Best Is Yet To Come is a ballad but heavy-handed with it, and on Samson And Delilah Hoffmann shines on an instrumental as epic as the Scorpions’ Coast To Coast.

Paul Elliott
Paul Elliott

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath - of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”