U.D.O. - Decadent

Published January 22 2015

*=Staff's pick	Speeder Decadent House Of Fake Mystery Pain Secrets In Paradise Meaning Of Life* Breathless Under Your Skin Untouchable Rebels Of The Night Words In Flame

Genre	Heavy Metal	Udo Dirkschneider	Vocals
Tracks	12	Kasperi Heikkinen	Guitar
Running time	59 Min.	Andrey Smirnov	Guitar
Label	AFM Records	Fitty Wienhold	Bass
Release	23 January 2015	Francesco Jovino	Drums
Country	Germany	-	Keyboard
Producer	Udo D./Fitty W./Mattes Pfeiffer
Similar artists	---

Drummer Francesco Jovino has since the recordings parted ways with the band.

Udo Dirkschneider and his band U.D.O. continues their quest for domination with a type of heavy metal that pretty much always stays safe in a determined domain, with only technology and time as sole components to form some variations between each record. Although the music itself through the years clearly hasn't gone through greater changes in shorter periods of time, obviously lots of things have happened on the 14 albums and the more than 27 years since the first record Animal House, but the development of the music is often minimal from one release to the next and you really know what to expect when you put a disc of this band into your audio system.

It's kind of characteristic though that I feel that most of the best stuff on this new release seems to derive from things that were made early into U.D.O.'s career, when it seemed more natural and the channels which the music were expressed through were still coming from a wild and living rawness. Sonically, I miss some of the vivid moments from before, because today's efforts are definitely sort of dry experiences and Decadent is no exception to the rule, even if former guitarist Stefan Kaufmann doesn't get to produce the band's records anymore.

In the end, this release is actually a pretty good effort, even if the band absolutely should have spent more time working on the choruses. The question is also if this type of approach still is appealing to the fans of heavy metal, since, like clearly said earlier, it doesn't differ much from the band's previous work and although the guitar play is a little different, because of new guys behind the strings, the rhythms are still familiar and so is the musical direction as well.

Nevertheless I think it's quite impressive that this outfit still tries to be relevant in this plethora of new bands, overflowing the metal fan at all stations, and although the band's fanbase is slowly decreasing, the man with the hoarse voice shows no signs of giving up an inch.

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
6	4	6	6	6

Summary
6 chalices of 10 - Tobbe