Band:	Accept
Album:	Too Mean To Die
Style:	Heavy metal
Release date:	January 2021

01. Zombie Apocalypse
02. Too Mean To Die
03. Overnight Sensation
04. No Ones Master
05. The Undertaker
06. Sucks To Be You
07. Symphony Of Pain
08. The Best Is Yet To Come
09. How Do We Sleep
10. Not My Problem
11. Samson And Delilah

Not sure if, at this point, Accept should be called Wolf Hoffmann Group instead. Or something along these lines anyway.

Not that this latest offering doesn't sound like it comes from the same band anymore; at the end of the day Wolf has always been the most important cog of this German metal machine. But the departure of Peter Baltes has seen him being the only original member left in a line-up that now features six people in total. I have no idea what he needs the other two guitarists for, but yeah, Accept now have three guitar players.

Too Mean To Die features most of what the band is known for. There is the faster, riff-centric opening track as well as the title track that follows, the hard rock-leaning "Overnight Sensation", the mid-tempo, chug-along / sing-along "The Undertaker", the corny ballad "The Best Is Yet To Come", and the best track, "Symphony Of Pain", with Wolf manifesting once again his love for classical music with a magnificent solo. The oriental album closer is a bit of a surprise, given the band's infrequent inclusion of instrumental tracks in their albums.

The songwriting of Too Mean To Die is consistently good, albeit not reaching great peaks. I had trouble finding a genuinely outstanding song but I didn't find anything to be unlistenable either. So, there aren't either really high ups or really low downs. Furthermore, having the same producer for all albums since Blood Of The Nations is another feature that makes this one a bit of a heard-it-all-before release. As competent a producer as Andy Sneap may be, all these Accept albums with Tornillo sound quite similar to each other and this latest one in turn has an almost identical mix to, say, Judas Priest's Firepower or Saxon's Thunderbolt. Anyway, what I am saying is that if anything could be the differentiating factor here, it would be the quality of the songs. And in this department, Too Mean To Die is actually Good Enough To Stay Alive.

It is a widely accepted fact that Accept had one of the most impressive comebacks in heavy metal history with Blood Of The Nations in 2010. However, since then, each subsequent album was a step down in quality when compared to its predecessor, so the real question here is if they have managed to stop the decline. The answer is that they did, even though the bar was low. Too Mean To Die is much better than the tame and completely indifferent The Rise Of Chaos, and it tries to justify its title at least to a certain extent. Whether that's enough depends on personal and subjective preference.

"I'm a heavy metal warrior
Restless son of a bitch"