102. Motorhead / Bastards. 1993. 4/5.

By the time 1993 rolled around, it had been a long time since a really good - and I mean a really good – Motörhead album had been released. There had been some good phases, and no doubt some good songs, but overall albums that caught the ear and made you want to play them were short on the ground. The two albums released in the 1990’s were especially true of this. Each had a couple of good tracks but also some very average fare. The onset of the grunge revolution meant some bands changed their sound to ride the wave. Motörhead instead released an album that stuck to what they do best while revisiting the sound that made them the band they are, and put it out under the title of Bastards.

The first five tracks on this album are probably the equal of any first side of any Motörhead album recorded, and I don’t say that lightly. It has the right mood and pace and riffage on each such that they are not alike but they mesh together beautifully as songs on albums should. The opening track “On Your Feet or on Your Knees” is a fast paced start with a good riff and typical Lemmy attitude, and is a great way to start the album. “Burner” is super-fast even for this band in their heyday, and the drumming from Mikkey Dee, taking the fight to the grunge era music by showing that speed and fire still has a place in the music world. “Death or Glory” joins the party on a fast and furious pace led by the thumping drums and rumbling bass of Lemmy, while Wurzel and Phil Campbell riff along in glee, trading solos that keep the song blazing and fresh. This is a real throwback to those early albums, the songs bursting out of the speakers and full of life and noise. “I Am the Sword” sounds great musically driven by Mikkey’s 2/4 drum hammering while Lemmy’s vocals rumble beneath the surface of the guitars. This is another beauty, a song that really is understated but brilliant as a result. Then comes the fire and energy of “Born to Raise Hell”, a terrific rollicking track that showcases everything that makes this band so good when they are at the top of their game.
You can’t have everything great I guess, and for me “Don’t Let Daddy Kiss Me” is a part of that here. It is the ‘ballad’ of the album, and is certainly as hard-hitting in lyrical content as for instance Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed” is, so I’m not disparaging that. But the song is out of place with the whole album. To this point it had been hard rocking and fast and enthralling, and then we get to the middle track of the album and it stops dead. It’s a mood killer, and it just makes me think this was mis-thought. Not to mention that Lemmy’s vocals in no way suit a song like this. Where you would place a song like this on an album like this I don’t know. Probably as a single, or B-side to a single, but of course by this day and age singles were becoming a thing of the past. Taking the song on its own merits it is good enough. As a pointer within the framework of the album it holds things back.
“Bad Woman” kicks thing back into gear, and even has a Jerry Lee Lewis-like piano banging away along with the crew. It’s a great song that combines all of those eras of rock together, and the energy emitted revitalises the album once again. “Liar” is another track in a similar vein. “Lost in the Ozone” is the second slow song on the album, though not so much as the previous track. It is more circumspect but still retains some of the energy that the rest of the album has. “I’m Your Man” has a bit of Soundgarden in the groove, which is the first hint on this rock album that Seattle exists. It’s a real surprise when you first hear that guitar sound on the song. It’s still a good song but the surprise continues every time I put this album on. “We Bring the Shake” is a standard hard rock track while “Devils” almost feels like a stadium rock anthem the way it is played and sung, and as a result it is strange that it wasn’t ever played more often in the live set. It almost has a Kiss, or at the very least Paul Stanley quality about it, and reminds me of the closing track on the Shocker soundtrack album. It’s a great way to finish the album.

While the first half of the album tends to eclipse the second half, this is one of my favourite albums by the band, in the main because the excellence is held throughout the whole of the album. There are a couple of songs that drag it back for me from being an absolute top shelf album, but it is by far the best album Motörhead released since their initial glory days, and the fact that it still holds up 25 years later is testament to that fact.

Rating: “I know what the blind man sees, on your feet or on your knees”. 4/5