In several interviews and books, drummer Mikkey Dee has been vehement in his disappointment with the album as a whole, a couple of songs in particular, and the fact that it had all been done so quickly, without any thought of extending. Dee was quoted as saying an extra three weeks would have allowed the band to produce a ‘great’ album instead of a ‘shit’ album.
The previous album “Overnight Sensation” had been the first written and recorded back as a three piece, and so it was hoped that now that the band had settled on this again, that the writing would turn out as solid. Some quarters suggest that the missing piece of Wurzel’s writing may have been an influence in the changing style of the songs. No matter where opinion may lie, there is little doubt that the result is mixed.
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 very 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. It has that fast pace, with blazing drums from Mikkey Dee in particular that dominate the track underneath Phil’s guitar and Lemmy’s bass and vocals, and the attitude that makes the best Motorhead songs.
“Dead and Gone” however 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. In my opinion at least.
“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 has been said by the members of the band in the years since. “Don’t Lie to Me” is a typical Motorhead rock n’ roll song, combining that with a fast paced blues guitar progression that is fun enough to listen to, while “Joy of Labour” settles 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 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. The tempo of the tracks is fine, which is at least a positive, but is no magic here that lifts them to a level that is worth getting excited about.
As it turns out, I had never heard this album until more than a decade after its release. Most of Motorhead tended to vanish from the perimeter for a good number of years, and I more or less stuck with the albums that I already knew rather than seeking out their new material when it was released. It wasn’t until around 2010 that I began to go back and find those albums released in that previous 15 years to see just what the band had put up as their offerings, and it is fair to say there was some gems and some wet molten mud. This one was one of the ones that I had problems with overall. The album is just a solid album. It doesn’t really have any highlights, and songs you would pick out to throw on a playlist for the car of a party. And it has a couple of songs that just make you look for the skip button. Which, of course, in the end, is how the damning aspect of an album can be judged.
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 in taste 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. They were also battling it out with industrial metal and nu-metal which was the rising force of popularity at the time, which made it all the more difficult to find yourself heard. Whether this albums suffers most from that, or from rushing too much in the writing and recording to really pull out the average songs and replace them with a variant, or if it was simply just a lack of inspiration, this ends up being only an average album in the band’s discography.
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