Replay: Accept, Restless and Wild, 1982

Just about everybody I grew up with listened to metal, but some of us were more into it than others. The devil horn diehards in our little town not only devoured the genre giants--AC/DC, Crue, Maiden, Priest--but explored the musical stylings of lesser-known guitar grinders. I can remember brief consideration of the merits of Dokken, Queensryche, Krokus, even W.A.S.P.

Of those second- and third-tier bands, though, one ran well ahead of the pack in our crowd: Accept. The German band's 1982 album, Restless and Wild, is the complete headbanger package: precision power chord anthems, classically influenced guitar solos and a shrieking lead singer (Udo Dirkschneider) who sounds like Bon Scott with the fatal vomit still gurgling in his constricting throat. Yeah.

With Accept, it's all about the lyrics. No it's not. But the lyrics are fun. We're not talking Dylan here. We're talking English-as-a-second-language simplicity. Take, for example, "Shake Your Heads," one of the album's catchier tracks: "Shake your heads/ Till your necks are breaking/ Shake your heads/ Cry out as loud as you can/ Shake your heads/ Till your brains are burning." This is not a vague message: Accept wants you to rock hard, muthafucka, and don't hold anything back.

The most recognizable songs on the album are the thrash metal precursor "Fast as a Shark" and the nearly melodic "Don't Go Stealing My Soul Away." Another highlight is "Neon Nights," a well-crafted dirge that may or may not have anything to do with Las Vegas, but ought to be played every hour or two on Friday and Saturday nights at the Hard Rock. Check this scrap of lyrical truth: "Red eye whisky/ And lady luck/ Have always been good friends."

The album's magnum opus, however, is the more than six-minute "Princess of the Dawn," one of the early attempts to give metal an artful edge. It relates some heroic tale involving knights, dragons and vestal virgins, but the song's strength is its musical complexity and its slow build a la "Stairway to Heaven."

Accept's glory days were shortlived. Its followup to Restless and Wild, 1983's Balls to the Wall, was another metal classic, but the band faded into obscurity soon after (even though it continued to record and perform well into the '90s).--Geoff Schumacher