Label: AFM Records
Release date: July 17, 2020
Production: U.D.O.
Album length: 74.58 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Well, it’s finally here. The new U.D.O. album is, proudly, also the first U.D.O. record that Slovenian bassist Tilen Hudrap has put his name on since joining the band. And what a “quirky” one it is, if you want to call it that. In fact, this album is just as much a U.D.O. album as it is an album by the sixty-piece state orchestra of the German Armed Forces (Musikkorps der Bundeswehr), who took part as full equals. U.D.O. have quite a bit of past experience working with orchestras. But “only” on stage. Back in 2015 they already played with the German Armed Forces’ state orchestra at the famous Wacken Open Air festival. Interestingly enough, the band later put out a live document, but there it performed its U.D.O. classics on the album “Navy Metal Night” alongside the naval orchestra Marinemusikkorps Nordsee.
Udo Dirkschneider, the guy we’ve watched on stages all these years decked out like a military deserter, has finally cashed in on his look. This time around he teamed up for the songwriting with his old pals and fellow Accept alumni Peter Baltes and Stefan Kaufmann. The latter, it’s worth adding, was a fixture in the U.D.O. lineup for years until he “retired” in 2012. Add the equally weighty arranging and composing contribution of conductor and lieutenant colonel Cristoph Scheibling, plus two more composers from the German Armed Forces’ orchestra, Guido Rennert and Alexander Reuber, and you get the album “We Are One”, which is definitely a beast of its own kind.
The truth is, the form of a U.D.O. song has been clearly mapped out for years. A constant that never changes. Naturally, it echoes old Accept here and there. It banks on sacred simplicity while always chasing that biting, destructive punch that puts Dirkschneider’s signature siren screech front and center. And this time it would be no different, if … The orchestra’s contribution is the factor that adds so many extra moments of arrangement-driven variety to the predictable song format that “We Are One” can be compared to the classic rock-crossover maneuvers, or more precisely, crossing metal with opera, which Blind Guardian, Rhapsody (in all variations of the name, anyway), Nightwish, Avantasia and Ayreon have all handled successfully in their careers, to name just a few. Thanks to its somewhat atypical musical character compared to the other U.D.O. albums (which I’m advising you against doing this time), the album picks up traits that make the end result akin to the musical building blocks of Euro power metal. That is, thanks to the orchestral “kitsch”, or put more nicely, the abundance of orchestral arrangements that add those theatrical extensions and inserts, choir harmonies included, to U.D.O.’s otherwise rugged, Teutonic, kick-you-straight-in-the-teeth primordial stance. In that caricatured sense, “We Are One” will sit even closer to fans of Sabaton, those mocking greenhorns who not so long ago so disrespectfully swiped the military boots, trousers and shirt from the Moses-like Udo.
After everything written above, it quickly becomes clear that “We Are One” demands considerably more patience from the average U.D.O. follower than a U.D.O. album built in the familiar key of preaching heavy metal purity would. Udo and the gang must have had an absolute blast making this album, because in such close dialogue with the orchestra they opened up so many unexplored chapters in their musical work that these brought a pile of tingling challenges into the studio, the likes of which they’ve never tried in their career. U.D.O. and the orchestra found an extremely harmonious and contemplative dialogue in it all, one that throughout the album keeps up, or even boosts, the theatrical drama that heavy metal inherently carries anyway. Pandemonium, which opens the album, makes all of this clear right from the start. In the chorus the track even turns vividly sinister (mostly thanks to how the famous vocalist contrastingly “stretches” that word as he sings it), and it’s also the album’s darkest moment. An opening catalyst, which the closing We Strike Back comes closest to in its pouty sulk. The latter brings a bit of nostalgia for Accept’s Fast As A Shark ravenousness, especially in the verse.
Generally speaking, this project isn’t just very bold, it’s above all a success. It fuses two musical worlds into an excellent, unusual body of work, a metal opera that keeps you entertained even in the theater. Mother Earth surely carries a distant family undertone of the famous Accept riff from Metal Heart, but the orchestra’s presence is so pronounced that you only start spotting such details after a few listens to the album. Then there’s Rebel Town with one of the album’s catchiest choruses, which the band enters through a build-up of atmosphere in a brilliantly slotted pre-chorus, and in the chorus, draped in thundering choir harmonies, it gives you goosebumps. The band also carved out enough room this time for another folksy, tickling dash of Russian melos, which of course goes back to the Accept days, when they absorbed that kind of theater so well in Future Is The Reason Why. It’s as if they breathed a pinch of Prokofiev and traditional Cossack kazachok tunes into the song, which will further fill the heart of every U.D.O. diehard. But don’t let it carry you too far. Warm vodka is still better than boiling kefir, after all.
The album vividly takes off on the doomy Pandemonium, rides the charisma of the old fox’s blessed screeching maneuvers up to a higher atmospheric level on the excellent title track and Love And Sin after it, then via the fun, aforementioned Future Is The Reason Why and the melancholic epic Children of the World reaches the first ballad. That’s Blindfold (The Last December), which is solid, but the lead female vocal doesn’t hit with as much charge as a bit later in the mid-tempo Neon Diamond, where Udo’s normal (mid-pitched) singing gels beautifully with the striking female voice right from the verse, and the song itself is even theatrically opened by an alto sax solo intro. Stiff-necked metalheads will raise their eyebrows. Not just their eyebrows, either, because a little later their whole faces might scrunch up at Here We Go Again, which, rhythmically (funky), pulls U.D.O. away from anything they’ve tried in the past, and so brings another welcome departure from the standards, with a moment of absolute surprise. If you know Rick Wakeman’s Buried Alive, with Ozzy guesting on vocals, you’ll get a rough compass bearing of what to expect here. Then there are three instrumentals, Blackout, Beyond Gravity with Udo Dirkschneider’s rousing and fun chanting (in the closing part), and the closing Beyond Good And Evil, which carries elements of film-score music.
Smirnov and Dammers spiced up the tracks with phenomenal guitar soloing, which is really an essential element that adds extra variety to the album and contrasts with, or further deepens, the individual moods. At the same time, in this ambitious and grand-scale project U.D.O. loaded their poetry with messages that sound an alarm, calling for the preservation of nature, an end to the destruction of the planet, the keeping of traditional values and tolerance toward everything different. It’s time we realize there’s only one planet and no other like it, and that we grab onto the other levers that guarantee its survival and with it the survival of our descendants. U.D.O. haven’t shied away from the occasional social commentary in the past, but they never overdid it. Well, on the new album there was plenty of room for raising awareness with a “green-tongued” sermon. So this is also a very eco-minded musical read. The lengthy foreword to the album, which you’ll find on the second and third pages of your CD booklet, which by now (and I’m certain of this) you all keep in your music collections, already hints at that.
Once again a giant of a review has come out, which at first was far from planned. Udo still sings like a well-oiled, freshly sharpened machine gun on “We Are One”. For a man carrying 68 years on his shoulders, that’s flat-out fascinating. And last but not least. With this album a long-held dream of his came true, so this achievement can surely be counted among the peaks of his long musical career, and he must be very proud of it. U.D.O. are already announcing the next studio album for next year, which will once again be cut in the craftsman manner of the Teutonic school of metal. Given the global situation we’re witnessing, “We Are One” is an artistically measured move that came at the right time in the right place. A sweeping project that succeeded in everything, it’s otherwise impossible to imagine on the world’s stages at the moment, with the travel and live-gathering restrictions tied to the pandemic, but it would be fascinating if it could one day come to life on stage too. Until that option exists, we have more time to devote to the details and little things while listening to this truly successful and tremendously fun project, brought by a singular, one-of-a-kind collision of U.D.O.’s vivid metal rhetoric with an orchestra.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Pandemonium
2. We Are One
3. Love And Sin
4. Future Is The Reason Why
5. Children Of The World
6. Blindfold (The Last Defender)
7. Blackout
8. Mother Earth
9. Rebel Town
10. Natural Forces
11. Neon Diamond
12. Beyond Gravity
13. Here We Go Again
14. We Strike Back
15. Beyond Good And Evil
U.D.O. lineup.:
Udo Dirkschneider – vocals
Andrey Smirnov – guitar
Fabian “Dee” Dammers – guitar
Tilen Hudrap – bass guitar
Sven Dirkschneider – drums
&
Das Musikkorps der Bundeswehr (conductor: Cristoph Scheibling)
