The most obvious thing to say about this album is… it is different. For everyone who has heard the first five studio albums, the style is immediately different. But all of those five albums had a degree of change along the way, none of them were an exact match for the previous one, so if you take this album as just a natural progression and not focus too much on the different guitaring styles of the previous guitarist and the new guitarist, you are halfway there to being able to appreciate this album for what it is rather than just dismissing it offhand because of the change. I know that I initially went down this path, completely put off by the change in guitar style especially. But once I sat down and just listened to it as an album, and not an album that Clarke had had no part of, I found a lot to like. Indeed, having been a fan of sections of Thin Lizzy’s work over the years I admired most of what Robertson has to offer here. I don’t think it always works, and I don’t think it really settles into what you would call a Motörhead sound, but there’s no denying it is catchy. There is almost none of the typical Lemmy bass lines and even the drumming appears much less frantic and rebellious.
Was the world ready for piano on a Motörhead album? Robertson contributes this on the songs “Shine” and “Rock It”, and while it isn’t a big thing it is a noticeable thing. Opening track “Back at the Funny Farm” has that classic bass sound to start, as does the closing track “Die You Bastard!”, but apart from that there is little that makes it stand out. “Dancing on Your Grave” is probably the closest this album has to a song that fits in with the past.
The most irritating song on the album is “One Track Mind” which closes out the first side of the album. It feels like five and a half minutes of the track title being repeated over and over and over again, and it is so different to most of the other material on the album. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Both “Just Another Day” and “Marching Off to War” are dominated by long instrumental breaks, including long solo sections from Robertson. The length of these is another point of difference between earlier albums. While Clarke had solo breaks they didn’t dominate songs by their length. That is not the case here, Robertson seems to have plenty of time to ensure he is noticed. It’s not unlikeable at all, in fact for the most point they are enjoyable, except maybe they just sound a bit too similar to each other? Perhaps. “I Got Mine" follows on a similar vein, with plenty of upbeat tempo, while “Tales of Glory” is a short, sharp burst of what has come before.
By the end of the album, and in real comparison to the other albums that preceded it, what really pulls this back just a little bit ends up being those extended solo breaks from Robertson. It feels a bit formula-oriented, a bit too try-hard for what would make it a better or equal album to the first albums. They are not bad or Malmsteen-esque in the show-off department, but they do perhaps tend to over dominate which was not a trademark of the earlier material. Overall the songs are good. Lemmy’s vocals are as good here as they probably ever got, and Taylor’s drumming sounds good as well, though it feels as though it has lost its intensity and is more interested in just keep time in places. Robertson is excellent, but his style eventually holds firm that it is indeed a different era that the band has moved into. Given that it was the only album he played on, no doubt the other extenuating factors proved to be a problem as well.
I enjoy this album more now than I did when I first listened to Motörhead and that probably has more to do with my maturing years and willingness to accept change than I used to in my youth. This is a good album (barring one notable song), but you need to take it on trust to get the most out of it.
Rating: “Let me hear it 'til the end of time”. 3/5
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