I have to be honest; I don’t know why anyone reviews Motorhead albums anymore. If you haven’t been paying attention these guys have been doing roughly the same thing for the past 33 years, namely blowing out everyone’s eardrums and loving it. These guys make Nigel Tufnel look like a weakling because Motorhead clearly goes up to 666 on the amp.
Lemmy as per his usual self defines gruff on the mic while his bass weighs many tons. This is accentuated by a crushing production that seems to think that you shouldn’t even have to turn the volume on to get deafened. Phil Campbell is his usual excellent self, dropping nice chunky riffs all over the place. The songs themselves cruise along at the usual Motorhead pace, sometimes getting rather fast but they don’t spend too much time in the slow lane. They also continue the blues explorations that really started up on Inferno with “Whorehouse Blues”. They really need to make a whole album of pure blues cuts. I know next to nothing about the blues, I just know when Motorhead break out the blues riffs you end up with great songs. It also breaks up the album a bit from the usual Motorheadly goodness. I don’t mind it really, but it’s nice to switch things up just to keep everyone guessing. They get into this on the song “One Short Life.” They also get into this quite a bit on the song “English Rose.” This is probably their bluesiest album that I can recall. It still sounds like Motorhead to be sure, however listening to these guys do an album of John Lee Hooker covers might be just the coolest thing ever.
They still bring the heaviness, especially on the song “Heroes”, which is the slow bruiser of the album. Of course it’s devoted to war and the carnage that follows. However I could listen to Motorhead war songs all day long, given how many they’ve put out I probably wouldn’t even listen to the same one twice. That said if you don’t love Motorhead already this album probably isn’t going to convert you unless you want something with more blues to it. Oddly enough the song with the least amount of discernible blues to it is the song “The One to Sing the Blues.”
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One of the best bands in the history of mankind. Grimmy will sacrifice you to Baphomet for reviewing this instead of him. Great review, by the way. Cheers!!!
on Oct 6th, 2008 at 22:08I’m sure Grimmy will back off a bit as I think I showed the proper reverence.
on Oct 7th, 2008 at 06:09That you did, man. I was recently listening to Belphegor and remembering your Sexdictator Lucifer comment. It still makes me laugh. Priceless.
on Oct 7th, 2008 at 19:23I’m still looking for that special gasmask wearing leather nun to call me that.
on Oct 7th, 2008 at 20:51One of the few bands where you actually look forward the the same album over and over again. And again.
Why haven’t AC/DC been this consistently good?
on Oct 8th, 2008 at 10:40