U.D.O.
Animal House

As we all know, a colonel cannot accept being given orders, and this is even more evident if the colonel in question is a true "Madman" and is officially registered as Udo Dirkshneider. So when Hoffman & co propose to the Teutonic frontman, after the release of a set of phenomenal albums, direct, fast, and raw like never seen before in the Heavy field (I'm referring to "Restless And Wild", "Balls To the Wall", "Metal Heart" and "Russian Roulette"), to soften the tone of composition to create a sound that would be more easily digestible by the masses, Udo leaves the Accept project and forms his solo band, named with a great effort of imagination U.D.O. Germans are people who do not like to waste time, and Udo proves it: within a few months of the breakup, he calls upon four skilled musicians (Mathias Diet and Peter Szigeti on guitars, Frank Rittel on bass, Thomas Franke behind the drums) and records "Animal House", probably U.D.O's most successful album, which could also challenge the great classics of Accept. The sound of the product is naturally what Accept fans love so much: the genre offered is Heavy-Speed Metal, characterized by frantic rhythms, tight riffs, catchy choruses and energy oozing from every pore. Ready, go, there’s immediately a trio of phenomenal songs, and indeed the best ones: the title track, with a very engaging refrain, "Go Back To Hell", one of the most powerful tracks and "They Want War", certainly the best-achieved track. Lyrics and sound intertwine perfectly in the piece, highlighting the problem of war, especially referring to the injustices child soldiers have to endure, who die like flies, with no one knowing who they are, even before they have cried in life, wielding rifles bigger than themselves:

Some are eight or nine or ten

And they die like a fly, and no one knows

Who they are, they're smaller than the gun they load

See their eyes open wide

They died before they ever cried

The remaining tracks inevitably suffer a decline compared to the explosive beginning, but thanks to the skill of the four musicians, precise and technical, yet always very direct, the qualitative level of the album remains very high, and the work is always catchy, energetic, powerful, and without a shadow of a flaw. Among the last songs, personally, I prefer "We Want It Loud", "Warrior", "Coming Home" and "In The Darkness", the latter a sort of ballad, characterized by sudden and pleasant accelerations.

In conclusion, every good metalhead and not should give this album or the Accept classics a listen before judging Accept and U.D.O as simply angry AC/DC, something unfortunately claimed by many due to the similarity in tone between Dirkshneider and Bon Scott (among other things, a great nonsense in my humble opinion). You will discover that many famous riffs from well-known bands are not as genius as they seem, but are only brilliantly copied from these two groups, never truly recognized and appreciated for their greatness and influence.