1072. Motörhead / Snake Bite Love. 1998. 2.5/5

If there is one major factor that you can’t take away from this band, it’s that they never stopped producing albums on a regular basis. For the most part, no more than a couple of years ever separated albums being released. That’s a tough thing to do, to keep finding inspiration and ideas on such a scale as to be able to fill the required volume that an album must have. To keep the quality of the product high enough to convince the fans to keep buying them also takes some ability. Somewhere in that, there has to come a time when the product doesn’t quite stack up, and that either more time should have been taking in either writing or recording the album – or both – or that perhaps there needed to be a longer time between releases to ensure everything was right. Maybe, just maybe, this album is one of those points in time for Motörhead.

Motörhead has always been at its best for me when the tempo is right and the songs have the right mix of heavy guitar and rock ‘n’ roll feel. For the most part there is little of that balance here. “Love for Sale” and “Dogs of War” start the album off well enough but don’t light any fire like previous Motörhead albums have. The title track “Snake Bite Love” tries to inject a bit of old fashioned rock ‘n roll into a heavier riff, while “Assassin” changes up the template but doesn’t really work. “Take the Blame” that follows is probably the best song on the album.
“Dead and Gone” is another Motörhead ballad, a style of genre that seems so alien to a band like Motörhead that it continues to be a surprise whenever I find a song like it on their albums. It just doesn’t fit with them, no matter how well written or played it might be. Certainly, Lemmy’s vocals never suit such a song which isn’t a criticism it’s just a fact. “Night Side” on the other hand just feels like it was thrown together in about five minutes, both musically and lyrically. In many ways it sums up how the whole album comes across, and it comes back to what I said at the top of the review. “Don’t Lie to Me” and “Joy of Labour” settle into that slow tempo that reveals the cracks in anything except top shelf Motörhead songs. Listening to Lemmy struggle over the vocals here makes it tough going.
Still, even these songs don’t quite prepare you for what can only be described as the utter boredom and sameness of the closing two tracks, “Desperate for You” and “Better Off Dead”. Neither of these songs provide even a glimmer of hope for the album. It’s a standard Motörhead progression while Lemmy’s doubled vocals can’t hide the weak lyrical content. It’s not that they are played poorly, just that they are both pulled from the same playbook that has been worn so thin that there is nothing stylish left. Thought they try to lift the tempo there is no magic here that lifts them to a level where it us worth getting excited about.

As it turns out, I had never heard this album until very recently, or if I had I don’t recall it. The continuing changes in the music scene at the turn of the century had affected many long-term bands, with releases by bands like Metallica and Megadeth in particular dividing fans with the changes they had made. The differences here are not through experimentation of changes tastes in the band, but perhaps just through running out of ideas as to how to best bring forth the music that fans of the band loved. Whether that was from rushing or just a lack of inspiration, this is only an average album in the band’s discography.

Rating:   “You can take the money but can you take the blame”.  2.5/5