Udo Dirkschneider - Balls To The Wall - Reloaded - review
Udo Dirkschneider - Balls To The Wall - Reloaded - review
Band
Udo Dirkschneider Release date
February 28, 2025 Tracklist
01. Balls To The Wall [Accept cover] [feat. Joakim Brodén]02. London Leatherboys [Accept cover] [feat. Biff Byford]
03. Fight It Back [Accept cover] [feat. Mille Petrozza]
04. Head Over Heels [Accept cover] [feat. Nils Molin]
05. Losing More Than You've Ever Had [Accept cover] [feat. Michael Kiske]
06. Love Child [Accept cover] [feat. Ylva Eriksson]
07. Turn Me On [Accept cover] [feat. Danko Jones]
08. Losers And Winners [Accept cover] [feat. Dee Snider]
09. Guardian Of The Night [Accept cover] [feat. Tim "Ripper" Owens]
10. Winter Dreams [Accept cover] [feat. Doro Pesch]
A review by
ScreamingSteelUS April 27, 2025
Rerecording whole albums is a divisive practice, one that probably warrants its own discrete treatise that I can just link to whenever the subject arises. The short version is that putting your hands on a masterpiece reeks of wayward meddling, even if it’s your own creation, even if your purposes are benign. And I have no reason to suspect that there are forces other than benign at play here: in interviews, Udo has described the origin of this rerecording as a desire to celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary with a tour or something similar, a plan that morphed into a new version of the album due to the interest of so many other musicians. The presence of a new guest vocalist on each song does turn this into more of a fun experiment or a tribute to the original work, which I would say insulates it somewhat from the usual implied egotism of such a project: “we can make magic twice, and even better the second time”. In any event, as far as rerecordings go, this is a lot less sinister an idea than, say, “we don't want to pay royalties to Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake”.
What’s more, although this particular initiative bears Udo Dirkschneider’s name, it is a little more of a family affair: 60% of the original line-up appears on this version, with former Accept bassist Peter Baltes joining the band full-time and former drummer Stefan Kaufmann contributing to the recording, mastering, arrangements, and performances in various capacities. Udo’s son Sven, long the drummer in U.D.O., handles the drums in Kaufmann’s stead.
Regardless of its intentions and provenance, however, this “reloaded” version stands in direct competition with one of the greatest pillars of its genre, and it comes away from this encounter bruised and beaten.
The primary fault lies in the recording itself. There’s no disguising it: the album sounds awful. It is as compressed as the matter in a black hole and as flat as Kansas. Sven, under Kaufmann’s guidance, makes some tweaks to the original drum parts that don’t sound half-bad, but it’s hard to appreciate any of the work he’s doing when they cymbals and snare are cranked into airy punches of distortion - the drums are consistently too loud and become overbearing in short order. The guitars are a lifeless digital schmutz that withers before the squealing, electrifying, sheet-metal-slicing sound of Wolf Hoffmann and Herman Frank. Udo’s vocals are often lost behind them even as they soften the tracks with tiresome loudness. The other vocal tracks are noticeably uneven, as if the guest vocalists all recorded their parts separately in different recording environments (or over the phone); perhaps that was an inevitability given the wide spread of contributors, but given that the 40th anniversary is actually two years gone now, there shouldn’t have been a rush to bring this to market. To use the parlance of every band that undergoes this new-age gelatinization process, it's “modern-sounding” alright, in that it has no dynamics whatsoever. Here I will cede my responsibility as the reviewer to Ansercanagicus, whose Bad Mixes list goes into more lucid detail than I ever could about some of the specific shortcomings of this recording. To me, it simply sounds ugly. Applying this production to some of the greatest heavy metal songs in the grand canon is a disgrace. I couldn’t exactly say it’s “disappointing”, as I never have positive expectations for these projects in the first place, so you might say the album is simply losing more than it ever had.
Woe upon woe, there is more to the album’s ills than the harsh quality of its recording. This is now an album of duets, which, paired with that stock band feeling, makes this feel like a cover album, and kind of a cheesy one at that. As I said earlier, that’s not altogether a negative, but the overall success relies heavily on the suitability of each pairing. As is always the case, there are stronger and weaker contributions. A lot of these recordings sound like first takes: awkward and unfamiliar, unpolished and inconsistent. Biff Byford stumbles down the main street of “London Leatherboys” while Michael Kiske noticeably strains in parts of “Losing More Than You’ve Ever Had”; even Ripper Owens delivers a surprisingly wearied and rasping take on “Guardian Of The Night”. Mille Petrozza’s stiff and atonal performance on “Fight It Back” sounds like he’s reading lines off a cue card and just about kills the momentum of the song, if not the album. It’s hard to get excited for the one redeeming aspect of this album when so often the stars are so dim.
At the same time, some rise above the bad mix. Ylva Eriksson of Brothers Of Metal is one of the more outside choices, but I love the feeling she brings to “Love Child” - even with inferior production, her impassioned performance makes her probably my favorite of all the guests. In spite of myself, I’ve even revisited the song just for that interesting flavor. Dee Snider sounds like a monster on “Losers And Winners”. He’s the oldest singer here after Biff and Udo himself, but the way he roars, you could never tell. And speaking of Udo, he has aged much like Lemmy: though he has noticeably lost range and power, with his searing, porcine bite numbing into a gummy grunt, he is still distinctly Udo, capable of delivering a unique sound that is compelling on its own. However much 40 years of age might have dulled his edge compared to the original recordings, he retains his personality as a vocalist. The one truly rough spot is “Fight It Back”, where the attempted recreation of his famous inhaled scream leads to a resounding misfire; that song as a whole is a sad dud. Otherwise, he puts on a fine show.
This is far from the worst rerecording of a full album I’ve ever heard. That honor still belongs to Six Feet Under’s shameful devouring of Back In Black. But this never sounds better than the original, or even comparable to it. This version, even with the guest vocalist gimmick offering some justification for its existence beyond being a carbon copy, has nothing to make it feel worthwhile, especially when the instrumental side of things is so confined. And anyway, what I really want to hear isn’t Dee Snider singing karaoke on an Accept track: I want to hear the Twisted Sister version. I don’t want to hear Mille Petrozza failing to recreate the Accept version: I want to know how Kreator would reinterpret “Fight It Back”. What I really want is an actual tribute album where these artists could make something new of this legend. Meanwhile, U.D.O. has been in good shape lately; Udo and friends have quite recently proven themselves capable of making better albums than this. I’d rather they continue building a new legacy instead of painting the lily. I do not Accept this.
Rating breakdown
| Performance: | 6 |
| Songwriting: | 10 |
| Originality: | 3 |
| Production: | 3 |
Written on 27.04.2025 by
Written on 27.04.2025 by
Dull Music for Dull People Comments
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Posts: 693
Wow, thank you for the quote. Rerecording an album is a huge task, and it's a shame they did failed at it. Maybe they should have proposed a remastered version, or old demos as bonus tracks, I mean something new to the table than wouldn't be half bad. They also could have picked another Accept album to remake, something easier to top. It's very hard to listen to this without recalling the original, I wonder how people not familiar with it would find this release. I'd still say that objectively the guests are badly made use of, it's odd to have someone just sing a single line and instantly be replaced by Udo. It's karaoke night. In the original (I repeat "i the original" a lot), the singer was a character part to the story told by the song, it exuded emotions tied to the lyrics. Here it's just "hold my beer, meeto can sing". And them singing together is no better, they don't even give the same rhythm to there words and it ends up being a mumbling mess
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Posts: 213  |
Posts: 213
Well let’s be honest, Udo has never been a musician aiming for sophistication and quality. He has been monetising on his legacy for decades now (not the first one to do so and not the last) It is quite sad to be honest, since he hasn’t produced anything worth listening since he left Accept but he still records and tours the world. I guess he loves it . Horrible music though, just horrible
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Posts: 5644 Written by ForestsAlive on 29.04.2025 at 13:17 That's harsh, I disagree, there are a few good albums since he left Accept the second time (as far as his style goes). Even Touchdown, his last one was quite enjoyable IMO.
---- I thought the two primary purposes for the internet were cat memes and overreactions.
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Posts: 6698 Written by ForestsAlive on 29.04.2025 at 13:17 I wouldn't go quite that far; he's never done anything on par with Accept for sure, but the first few U.D.O. albums were quite good. I've enjoyed his subsequent albums, too, however mildly. I could see him going for another ten years, left undisturbed. But this album is almost entirely unlistenable.
---- "Earth is small and I hate it" - Lum Invader I'm the Agent of Steel.
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