Album review: Motorhead, 'The World is Yours'
3 stars (out of 4)
“Go ahead, put the blame on me,” Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister sings at the outset of Motorhead’s 20th album, "The World is Yours" (UDR), as succinct a summation as any of a life lived large and frequently outside the margins of mainstream acceptability. With Hawkwind and later Motorhead, Lemmy defined punk attitude long before Johnny Rotten did. His music was infamously loud and violent, an influence on everyone from early Metallica to the Foo Fighters, and “The World is Yours” remains unrepentant: 10 succinct fists to the face, with Lemmy’s fuzz-tone bass and gravel-gargling voice (positively Medieval-sounding on “Brotherhood of Man”) riding alongside Mikkey Dee’s relentless drumming and guitarist Phil Campbell’s rude riffs. No ballads, sentimentality or remorse could possibly survive in this toxic atmosphere.
Lemmy’s obsessions remain intact – there are songs about death, outlaws, war and the saving power of the music that Little Richard and Chuck Berry invented. Much of this will sound familiar to Motorhead fans, but there are enough sly lyrical twists to keep things fresh, and when all else fails, Motorhead’s rhythm section is still beastly. As with the better Motorhead albums from the last two decades, a handful of songs should survive as candidates for future concert set lists. Among them are “Get Back in Line,” in which Lemmy declares his inalienable right not to be a lemming, and “I Know How to Die,” bravado incarnate.
greg@gregkot.com
Typo alert: You misspelled "Motörhead"
-- MrJM
Greg replies: Gotta work on my umlauts
Posted by: MrJM | February 08, 2011 at 10:27 AM
Awesome!!! Can't wait to see them again!
And, it's great that no r&b or hippety hop reviews were included in today's paper. It's always refreshing when the reviews cover bands with ACTUAL MUSICIANS in them, as opposed to the mainstream.
Thanks again!
Posted by: kjb666 | February 08, 2011 at 12:30 PM
Good to see the review! As a Motorhead fan I am of course happy with the album! Wonders what your counterpart has to say.
Posted by: Richard | February 10, 2011 at 01:26 PM