Motörhead

Over thirty years in and you still can't get Motorhead to be anything but the loud, booze-fueled and dirty rock n' roll bastards they've been since day one. You can't get them to stop kickin' ass either. Their 20th studio album, Motorizer, sees Lemmy Kilmister, Mickey Dee and Phil Campbell still happily dancing with the same sleazy bitch that brought 'em here years ago, and the moves are only getting hotter.

Delivered with that classic Motorhead raunch, "Runaround Man" and "Teach You To Sing The Blues" are catchier than a case of herpes. A bit fast paced and more aggressive, "Buried Alive," "Time Is Right" and "When The Eagle Screams" would fit in right alongside tunes from the likes of 1916 or Bastards. Motorizer's resident anthems come from the punk-spawned "Rock Out," which could go down as this generation's "Ace Of Spades," and the more dramatic and bulldozerishly metallic "Heroes." Of course, anytime you hear a Motorhead album, you're going to get a taste of Lemmy's patented, Chuck Berry-inspired R&B swagger and "English Rose" is the tune that'll get your feet moving this time out. From the bang-your-head-to-the-blues department. "One Short Life" stands as the grittiest blues-rocker this side of the '70s.

Pepper it with all the fancy descriptors and adjective that you wish, but the best and perhaps only real way to describe a Motorhead album is to say that it sounds like Motorhead. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about Motorizer, then on behalf of Lemmy; fuck off.

–Ryan Ogle
09.25.08

Even if Motörhead had broken up around 1983 or 1984, they still would have gone down in history as one of the most influential metal outfits of all time. Motörhead, after all, was the first metal band to seriously incorporate punk; they wrote the book on thrash metal and speed metal in the late '70s and early '80s, paving the way for Slayer, Metallica, Venom, Megadeth, Testament, Anthrax, Death, Exodus, and countless others. But Motörhead, of course, didn't break up in 1983 or 1984, and they were still cranking out quality albums in the late 2000s. Lemmy Kilmister (who turned 62 in 2007) shows no signs of slowing down on 2008's Motorizer, which Cameron Webb produced at Dave Grohl's 606 Studios in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that Webb has worked with a lot of alt rock and alt metal artists (including Limp Bizkit, Orgy, Godsmack, Buckcherry, Lit, Ben Folds, and Monster Magnet) and produced this 39-minute CD in a studio that is owned by a member of the Foo Fighters and ex-member of Nirvana, Motorizer makes no effort to be alternative-sounding. Instead, the classic Motörhead sound prevails, and forceful, in-your-face tracks such as "Buried Alive," "Runaround Man," "When the Eagle Screams," and "Time Is Right" sound like they could have been recorded 25 years earlier. Motorizer never pretends to be groundbreaking, but if the material is predictable, it is engagingly predictable; Kilmister sounds inspired and focused throughout the album, and at 62, he has yet to overstay his welcome. Motorizer falls short of essential and isn't quite in a class with Motörhead's best late-'70s/early-'80s output, but this album is definitely respectable -- and it is good to see this seminal thrash/speed trio still plugging away after so many years in metal's trenches. ~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide