Search - U.D.O. :: Mean Machine

Good Power metal album

Darth Raider | La Mesa, CA United States | 06/09/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a good UDO album. It rocks and has good melodic lyrics. I would recommend this CD along with Animal House as far as the solo work of UDO goes."

Acceptable? Definitely!

Paul Lawrence | Australia | 06/11/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I arrived at my score of four stars for this album like this: Firstly I took it as read that Balls to the Wall was a five star release. Nuff said. I then looked at the mans first solo album and despite it's serviceability it didn't it the bullseye terribly often. So I gave that three stars in my review. So it only remained for me to compare this album to those two benchmarks.



And as far as I'm concerned this is clearly better than Animal House. The musicians on that were good but the songs weren't as sturdy as the ones here. There is more of a feel of weighty importance here and less 'average 80's metal' inflections to the songs and production and Mean Machine seems to benefit from Udo being more attuned to being essentially a solo act. All the incremental improvement means that the straight ahead traditional metal here merits a better score than Animal House.



As to comparisons with Balls to the Wall? Well unltimately this doesn't feel as varied as that meisterwerk. There is some variety here from the heads down metal pounding in some of the tunes but it just doesn't feel as expansive. Almost like where Accept as of '84 could of still ruled the planet, here all involved know that all they can hope to dominate is a chunk of the German metal market. A creditable niche to be sure and one filled with knowledgeable fans who value history etc, but still a smaller world than the one that seemed to beckon for Udo with his previous band.



So there you go, hopefully my reasoning behind my score makes sense to you!"