2023 CD Review - U.D.O. - Touchdown

U.D.O.
Touchdown
Atomic Fire Records - 2023
https://www.udo-online.com

Touchdown, the eighteenth studio album from U.D.O., kicks off in rather hard-hitting fashion and that's just talking about the rather striking album cover art. Of course, the music is hard-hitting as well! While that isn't much of surprise in general, it is always when an album starts off with a metallic punch in the face as the entry point for fans.

With the band now being joined by former Accept bassist Peter Baltes and adopting the American football motif for both the album title and photo package promoting the album, the band fires on all cylinders out of the gate with the song "Isolation Man". The song sets a ripping pace right from the start. Between the musical soundtrack and Dirkschneider's guttural vocal performance, it's an explosive mix from start to finish. Add in a cool solo and everything falls into place for this one.

"The Flood" is pretty much an uptempo number as well but it is markedly slower than "Isolation Man". And that's a good sign for U.D.O. mixing things up on the album.

With the album's material written by Udo and drummer Sven Dirkschneider as well as guitarists Andrey Smirnov and Dee Dammers, U.D.O. the band captures their sound well and consistently on Touchdown.

You get the molten metal tracks like "The Double Dealer's Club" (a fantastic song) and you get the fists pumping in the air anthems like "Fight For The Right". That latter track is absolutely crushing in its presentation. There are a few other anthemic type tracks on the album and I don't mind saying that I was swept up in them each time I listened to the album. Another example would be "Forever Free" which hit the mark for me right from the first listen.

If there's one thing missing on Touchdown, it is a demonstrably slow or ballad type of track. And while U.D.O. has had some decent luck with that kind of song, I didn't miss it this time around.

It took me a few spins of the album to gain an appreciation for the song "Sad Man's Show" but as I was listening to that particular track for the last time before writing this review, the song really connected with me. It's another fast-moving song but from the opening laugh from Udo Dirkschneider to the killer musical score, I finally "got" the song.

The full-on slamming nature of "The Betrayer" is just a sonic blood-letting. Meanwhile, "Heroes of Freedom" has both that anthemic feel to the song AND an incredible guitar solo so that I found I was fully engaged in every aspect of the song.

I don't know if I would consider it a mind-blowing surprise or anything but I was at least a little surprised by how much I liked "Better Start to Run". The fast rocking song has a really interesting rhythm and feel to it that made a pretty strong impression on me. I could say the same for "The Battle Understood" which had a straightforward nature to it but yet I felt had a blazing presence at the same time.

The double shot of songs that closes out Touchdown are "Living Hell" and the title track. On "Living Hell", I dug the guitar solo a lot with the song as a whole being pretty invigorating. But the title track...it's like the depths of hell opened up or something. Brightly burning pace, a full on metallic attack. Between the highly aggressive soundtrack and a viciously edged vocal turn from Udo himself, this song is perfectly cast as a track to represent the album as a whole. It's flipping fantastic!

I don't mind saying that when I did my first couple of spins of the CD, I wasn't fully on board with the album as a whole. But that had a bit to do with where and how I was listening to the disc. I was distracted as I was listening. I liked individual songs as I wrote about above but there seemed to be a lack of connective tissue for me. But once I sat down with a clear focus on just listening to the album without a bunch of things distracting me, everything fell into place.

U.D.O.'s Touchdown is a killer metal record, period. What more needs being said than that?