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ACCEPT Sweden Rock Magazine
Preview listening: ACCEPT
Fourteen years after the Farewell tour and five years since the last sign of life, ACCEPT is working on a new album. As the very first magazine, S.R.M. has in Gothenburg together with Wolf Hoffmann prelistened the new material.
When Udo Dirkschneider in 2005 declared that he was not interested in continuing ACCEPT anymore, everyone thought it was the end of the band. When guitarist Wolf Hoffmann and Bassplayer Peter Baltes last summer brought ACCEPT to life again they were facing a lot of skepticism. The band who inspired me on my first tatto has a lot to live up to.
But how come ACCEPT have an almost finished album when it seemed so unlikely less than a year ago?
-It just happened, Wolf explains. That guy Mark just walked into our lives from nowhere, by pure luck.
Real thing
His full name is Mark Tornillo and he has been the singer of New Jersey based TT Quick. Through a mutual friend, they came in contact with him. They met him in the middle of may last year, for a succesful jam, which resulted in the versions of "Flash Rocking Man" and "Balls To The Wall" which later came published on the band Myspace.
-We were overwhelmed how good he suited out style. By then we knew Udo didn't want to reunite with ACCEPT so we thought: "This is our guy! Why not have a reincarnation of ACCEPT, with a new voice?" We did not even think about it before, but now when he was there we thought we had to give it a chance.
Did you consider any other?
-Hell no! If so we would have had a regular audition and probably been fleewing in a lot of people.
By this time there were no new material written, so this was really a new start for ACCEPT.
-We had some ideas, some small parts through the years stored, a riff here and a riff there. However, we wrote all the songs from scratch. It all started to take real shape when we began working with producer Andy Sneap. He sat down with us and forced us to listen to our old stuff and said: "This is ACCEPT! This is what I want to hear, and not so much of that." He really helped us shaping the vision for the album.
-We realized we had some weird, exprimental songs on the last two albums (Death Row 1994, and Predator 1996). Of course we know they were not so good and succesful, so we tried keeping away from that era and really concentrate on true ACCEPT.
Do you think the fans will accept a new singer? You tried it before.
-Sure. It didn't worked out because we changed the music radically, which was a big mistake. We were chanceless already from start.
Classical and modern
Even if the eight songs I got to here were neither ready mixed or entirely recorded, I can say that the production is fat, up to date and not retrosounding but still organic.
-We've been cautios with the whole Pro Tool thing, because we didn't want it to be "laptopmetal". It would not sound so constructed on a computer, so we had to balance on a thin line; try keeping it alive and organic but still use modern technology.
There's no doubt who handles the guitars then Wolf's characterestic guitarplaying immediately is recognized, both the heavy riffing and the solos. Songs like "Locked And Loaded", "Shades Of Death", "Pandemic" and "Abyss" are filled with typical ACCEPT-riffs. With Mark Tornillo in top shape it sounds fantastic. The voice must've been matured and refined because he has never sounded this good with TT Quick.
ACCEPT without Udo Dirkschneider? Why not? As a gigantic fan it was very hard for me to picture ACCEPT without him and Stefan Kaufmann (Ex-drummer and now guitarist for U.D.O.). I can not hear any reason why this would not work with both old and new fans. The material is a natural extension of the classical sound, but in a modern suite.
-It sounded like ACCEPT, didn't it? We're not trying to re-invent the wheel, we just say that we do our best. Hopefully it will be as good as the old. If it's even better? That would be exiting
Article by Daniel Berg, Sweden Rock Magazine #68
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