ACCEPT: THE RISE OF CHAOS (2017)
1) Die By The Sword; 2) Hole
In The Head; 3) The Rise Of Chaos; 4) Koolaid; 5) No Regrets; 6) Analog Man; 7)
What's Done Is Done; 8) Worlds Colliding; 9) Carry The Weight; 10) Race To
Extinction.
Yes, it is that season again — the rise of
chaos, where everybody drinks too much Koolaid with no regrets, leading to
worlds colliding where people race to extinction, dying by the sword with holes
in their heads. And this means another Accept album that sounds just like any
Accept album since Blood Of The Nations,
just as the rise of chaos circa 2017 looks just like any other rise of chaos at
any given point in the life of human civilization.
There is absolutely no point in discussing the
music here; all I can say is that there are no experiments with the sound
whatsoever — all the songs differ from each other strictly in terms of tempo —
and that not a single riff has struck me as being particularly outstanding,
though, to be fair, Hoffmann is still spending time trying to come up with new
ones: they simply all end up sounding like variations on the old ones. The only
thing that makes this less of a problem than it was on Blind Rage is that the album is notably shorter: ten new songs is
all she wrote, and, frankly, there is no need for an Accept album to ever be
longer than 45 minutes, unless your casual adrenaline supply exceeds everybody
else's.
The lyrical content, while trivial, is another
matter: more than ever before, The Rise
Of Chaos sounds like a wholesome concept album about the sordid state of
things in the world at large — a problem that has always stayed relevant for
Accept, but now more than ever, as they grow old and, consecutively, more and
more bitter and skeptical about the piss-poor progress of humanity. Clearly,
this should endear their attitude to my own heart, as I also grow older and
more bitter and skeptical about the same things, but they just regularly go
overboard with this thing, nowhere more so than on ʽAnalog Manʼ, where part of
the blame on the overall moral decay is laid on digital technologies ("I
was born in a cave, when stereo was all the rage... now there's flat screens in
3D, my cell phone's smarter than me, I can't keep up, my brains are beginning
to burn"). You know you've really crossed over into bizarre territory when
the familiar gang choruses of DOGS ON
LEAAADS! and BALLS TO THE WALL!
are replaced with UPDATE AND DOWNLOAD!,
and silly diatribes like that do a poor service to Accept's general stand on
human issues.
On the other side of the equation there's
ʽKoolaidʼ, a welcome historical reminder of the 1978 Jim Jones nightmare as an
allegory for today's problems with mass brainwashing — Tornillo's admonition
of "don't drink the Koolaid, no matter what the preacher says!" truly
deserves his highest notes, and while I could certainly live without a detailed
account of the events in the verses (then again, perhaps a brief history lesson
is good for Accept fans), this is the only song on the album that slightly transcends
the state of generic ranting and raving, just because they happened to single
out a pretty damn good analogy for modern times.
Other than that, Rise Of Chaos simply ticks off three more years of Accept's
longevity: given that Hoffmann has only just turned 58, and that Mark Tornillo,
though somewhat older, is still going very strong as a vocalist (and,
cynically, is expendable anyway), this is probably far from the last Accept
album in the making, unless, of course, they happen to be true about the ʽRace
To Extinctionʼ, and we're all drinking Koolaid over the next three years. With
this in mind, I am going straight ahead to update and upload, adding my own two
cents to the downfall of humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment