Ten songs on the sleeve, and not one of them credited to the band whose name is printed across the front. When RCA released Animal House on 3 November 1987, every note of music and every line of words on it was signed to Accept, the band that had just parted with its singer and ripped his name off the letterbox, and the debut of U.D.O. was in truth the Accept album that never got made: a house poured, framed, wired and roofed by Udo Dirkschneider's old bandmates, then handed over with the keys while the builders moved down the street. A strange inheritance. Also a good record.
The man with the sandpaper throat has told the story himself. The songs, he said to Burning Ambulance on 30 January 2015, were "planned to be the next [Accept] album after Russian Roulette," and he had worked on the lyrics before the others decided they could do without him, telling him, in his account, "With Udo, we cannot break the American market." Accept tried other singers and settled on the American David Reece for Eat the Heat in 1989. Udo kept the blueprints.
Drawn from two neighbouring garrisons of the German scene, guitarist Peter Szigeti and bassist Frank Rittel out of Warlock, where both had played on the first three albums, second guitarist Mathias Dieth out of Sinner and Thomas Franke behind the kit, the hired crew of the new house walked into Dierks Studios in Cologne, Accept's own old workshop, in August 1987. Mark Dodson, the engineer behind Judas Priest's Sin After Sin, sat in the producer's chair, and in October the crew walked out with a master tape that sounds full, loud and polished to a chrome finish. They had the blueprints. They did not have Wolf Hoffmann.
"Animal House" opens with the lights off, a long, murky stretch of atmosphere and distortion, and then the riff arrives and splinters the boards across every window at once, letting the whole Accept machine pour through the frame: the crunch, a chorus built to be shouted back, and above it Udo's voice, a rusted saw dragged across sheet steel that turns every refrain into a warning. "Go Back to Hell" follows as the plainest thing here, a straight steel girder of a song that would have slotted onto any mid-eighties Accept record without a soul checking the credits. Then "They Want War" stomps in at mid-tempo under a wash of keyboards and a children's and youth choir, an anti-war anthem that sounds faintly absurd for a single chorus and then refuses to leave the skull. The house is never more alive than in these first three rooms.
What follows the opening trio is where the inheritance starts to show its seams. Szigeti and Dieth play these parts the way a careful tenant keeps somebody else's furniture: polished, correct, every piece exactly where the previous owner left it, and never once moved to see how the room might look otherwise. The riffs are sturdy and the solos tidy, but the guitars never bite with the venom that Hoffmann put into the same kind of writing, and across a whole side the difference adds up. The lean towards the radio, too, is audible. These songs were written by a band that wanted America, and the choruses are cut wide, smooth and friendly.
They had the blueprints. They did not have Wolf Hoffmann.
"In the Darkness" is the record's ballad and the best argument for the new line-up, a slow build that holds its tension from the first verse to the last chorus and earns its place in the middle of the album rather than merely pausing it, and in that same 30 January 2015 interview with Burning Ambulance Udo named it, beside "They Want War", among the "really good live songs" on the record. "We Want It Loud" is the opposite case, an up-tempo rocker that promises a cavalry charge and delivers a brisk gallop round the paddock, energetic and gone from memory by the next track. Then the record recovers its nerve at the very end. "Run for Cover" closes on a measured, almost military march, big AOR backing choirs and a broad anthem of a chorus, banners up for the last lap, the clearest sign that this crew could carry a big song when the song was built to be carried.
The charts barely registered it. Animal House entered the Swedish album chart on 17 February 1988 at No. 41 and stayed for one week, while the band that had written it waited until 1989 to put out its own American-voiced answer. Of the two parties to the split, only the singer walked away with these songs.
Measured against Accept's own Restless and Wild or Balls to the Wall, this record sits a clear rung lower: the same foundations, thinner guitars, a middle stretch that coasts on the floor plan. As the first stone U.D.O. ever laid, it is solid, loud and honest, with three songs at the front strong enough to hold any stage. For the Accept faithful whose story stops at Russian Roulette, it is the missing chapter of that songwriting partnership, sung by the voice it was written for, and leaving it on the shelf means never hearing how that line of succession was meant to continue. A fine house. Somebody else chose the furniture.