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ACCEPT
The Rise Of Chaos
Nuclear Blast - 2017
http://www.acceptworldwide.com

"All fight for survival, in this apocalyptic maze, Caught in a downward spiral, right through this cataclysmic blaze" I'm not quite sure who might've peed in the Wheaties during ACCEPT's writing sessions for their brand new and utterly fantastic album The Rise Of Chaos, but it produced a pretty unrelenting brand of metallic rage in the songwriting.

Whether it is on a personal, group or world stage level, the end of the world stylings on this album seem so impossibly bleak that even Conan The Barbarian's grim god Crom would cry out for some hearts and flowers. At the same time, this album is highly, if a bit oddly, entertaining.

With producer Andy Sneap once again behind the control board, ACCEPT abandons any notion of subtlety and insteads hits the listener with a jackhammer attack from beginning to end. It says something when the band isn't going full throttle, the songs are still pretty damn fast paced.

Wolf Hoffmann's guitar fuels the rage that is so evident throughout the disc, and Mark Tornillo embodies each song's lyrics as if he really was living each line instead of just being the narrator of a particular viewpoint.

As I said previously, the bleak outlook of the songs takes a look at the end of the world from a world view, a personal level and even from the viewpoint of a survivor of the Jonestown Massacre on the track "Koolaid". Admittedly when I saw the song title on the album's liner notes I thought the band was being a bit goofy but I soon learned otherwise.

It's funny how being confronted by the possibility of the world going to hell in a handbasket can provide such a good musical soundtrack. The album's title cut (from which the opening lyrical stanza in this article comes from) is a pretty depressing outlook on things as they stand. "Carry The Weight" implores the listener to do the exact opposite while more explicitly addressing things that are going wrong with the world today. If not for the vibrantly faster pacing on the songs, depression would be the outcome for anyone listening to the tracks. Meanwhile, "Race To Extinction" closes out the album by laying bare once again real world ills, while imploring for everyone to make a change.

I mentioned that some of the tracks have a more personal feel to them though the overall thematic design of worlds ending is still intact. On "Worlds Colliding", Tornillo sings of a war being fought within one's own self, two competing desires battling it out for control.

While the lyrics are pretty much guaranteed to not get the band the stamp of approval from any women's group you could think of, the song "Hole In The Head" looks at a mutually destructive relationship through the lens of a ruthlessly vicious set of lyrics.

Perhaps my favorite track on the disc is "Analog Man", where being a man out of step with the times as progress and technology in particular move ever forward. When I heard the line "My cell phone's smarter than me", I actually burst out laughing. While I'm a little more tech savvy than the song's main character, I do know exactly how someone would feel in that situation.

Now, it isn't all death, doom and destruction. The one song that offers a kind of respite from all that is "No Regrets". The song title gives away the viewpoint the lyrics take. It's an acceptance of things, a valedictory summary of a life lived.

It is a bit of a juxtaposition to be this energized after listening to an album that is borne out of a brutal and dark outlook on things, but The Rise Of Chaos really has something going for it. It may be something less than a bright ray of sunshine, but this album is another ACCEPT pure molten metal masterpiece!

5.0 Out Of 5.0

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