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Thursday, March 3, 2011

Motörhead - The Wörld Is Yours: A-


The people who claim to have figured out the “Motörhead formula” by saying that they simply release the same song over and over are naïve and ignorant. There is a very definite formula for why and how Motörhead manages to come up with albums every couple of years that sound starkly similar, but it’s not because they fucking thought “Hey mates! Let’s just rewrite the same song for each album we release!” No, you fools! It’s not that simple! The truth is Motörhead albums have all sounded extremely similar since the early nineties, because each new album up to and including this point has been a random collection of songs that were recorded in a massive studio session in 1991.

Exhausted and frustrated with the process of going to a studio between tours to record a new album, of which sometimes there were two released in two consecutive years, frontman Lemmy Kilmister came up with the ingenious plan to, for a full month, record as many songs as possible and to release ten to eleven of them every two to three years. In December of 1991, Lemmy, guitarist Phil “Zoomer” Campbell and Drummer Mickey Dee walked into Music Grinder Studios in Los Angeles and emerged on January 1st 1992 with 3,129 new songs. With the exception of the independently recorded Inferno, each new Motörhead album sounds similar to the last, because all of them have been produced by the same producer with the same equipment at around the same time so that Lemmy’s mind could be eased in between tours.

So essentially, what we have with The Wörld Is Yours and every other Motörhead album that has been released since 1991, is the very definition of a grab bag. As you can infer, the quality of a Motörhead album has not depended on the band’s lyrics, instrumentation or mood for decades. Now that you know the ultimate Motörhead secret, you can see that what makes a Motörhead album good at this point is the track sequencing; does this collection of songs sound good in this particular order?

For 2008’s Motörizer, this was, for the most part, not the case, for 2002’s Hammered, this was most assuredly not the case and, for 1996’s Snake Bite Love, this was hell-to-the-no not the case. But, for 2011’s The Wörld Is Yours, this is the case. Now, I could go into detail about why I think The Wörld Is Yours is good and why I believe that it’s the best Motörhead album since 2004’s Inferno. I could say that I like the stabs of guitar chords in “Outlaw”, that I like some of the lyrics in “Get Back in Line” like “Good things come to those who wait/But these days most things suck” or “If you think Jesus saves/Get back in line”, but come on. This is a motherfucking Motörhead album we’re talking about, here. Do you know when the last Motörhead album is going to come out? 2324! I’m doing you a favor by not giving you more details! I’ll leave that to the historian in 2350 that has to create the archive of the entire musical career of Motörhead in a fifty two-volume book series. Just know that The Wörld Is Yours is excellent, listen to it if you wish, and hold tight for another couple years when, like the Disney Vault, ten more songs will be released from the “Music Grinder” sessions.

You must guard The Secret of Motörhead with your life. It seems easy now, but things are going to get really heated in a couple decades, when people begin to wonder how Lemmy can release ten, twenty, then hundreds of posthumous albums. Motörhead albums are, essentially, compilations, now, and that’s a dangerous prospect with a scope of which I don’t think even Lemmy, understands. Many have called him the cockroach of rock and roll; a man who, no matter what, will still be coming out with new material. I’m here to tell you that, in three hundred years, Lemmy’s going to wish that he had the brief longevity of a cockroach. In the case of The Wörld Is Yours, the Motörhead formula has served the group and humanity well, but its repercussions are farther-reaching than you or I will ever see come to fruition in our lifetimes. I pray that civilization will find a way to outmaneuver the Pandora’s box that Motörhead opened that fateful December in 1991. And, now that you know, you have just as much responsibility as I do to surreptitiously warn others of the catastrophe that is to befall us all.


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