Artist: Motörhead
Label: Chiswick Records
Released: 1977
Running time: 32.52
Rating: 2.5/5
“Motorhead” can be read as an honest piece of shorthand capturing the pulse and motion of the zeitgeist of the second half of the 1970s. That’s exactly when punk sprouted, followed by an uncontrolled epidemic of short, untamable, razor-sharp, anarchic spurts of musical madness, awful for the ear and harmful to the stomachs of old farts. Armageddon time had come! Somewhere in that “cave of lunacy” Motorhead put down roots too, which of course means their studio christening could barely drag itself away from the state of mind described above. Naturally, on the debut we catch Lemmy and company in a Precambrian phase, complete with a vehemently pulsing, supernatural sense of aesthetics and a finesse for carving, sorting and pasting together a recognizably touching musical collage. Strictly from a musical standpoint, it’s a standout of special aesthetic value, with added chaos, hysteria and symptoms of schizophrenia that would drive a slightly out-of-sorts Nazi junker to suicide out of pure jealousy barely three and a half minutes after the Red Army took the Reichstag.
First, a few facts about how the album came to be. Motorhead had in fact already popped their studio cherry with the infamous “On Parole”, but thanks to the ignorance of overbearing label moths it didn’t see the light of day until 1979, when “Overkill” and “Bomber” were already proving the worth of Motorhead stock. The spots of the unpredictable Larry Wallis and Lucas Fox were taken soon after the “On Parole” shipwreck by the indispensable Philthy Animal Taylor and Eddie Clarke, and their arrival was understandably followed by a thorough retouching of the original recordings.
The album is noticeably missing something: consistency. Put differently, when the debut came out, Lemmy and company were still tormented by an identity crisis. You can tell that before they developed their recognizable, roughly distorted torque, Motorhead hopped left and right, quickly getting excited about one idea or stylistic leaning and then just as quickly ditching it for another one that obviously suited the moment better. The jumps are, to put it mildly, pretty clumsily pulled off. About “White Line Fever” there’s no room for doubt: this raging rocker of a swift can safely be called one of the first Motorhead classics, and the same goes for the already battle-hardened “Motorhead” number, which, unlike in the days of the bizarre space-rock excursions with Hawkwind, finally got to the essence, spread its wings in earnest and sharpened its talons. In the only other straight-ahead assault, “Keep Us On The Road”, Lemmy develops the razor-sharp formula of future triumphs (except that later it would, as a rule, always be backed by ear-splitting wah-wah barking), while “Iron Horse – Born To Lose” somewhat more awkwardly squeezes its way into the impoverished company of the album’s memorable moments.
Sadly, the other half of the album is quickly forgotten. Here we wade straight into a nest of flashing clues that clearly hint at the fact that in the band’s early days a lot was made out of pure goofing around. The lack of creative inspiration is plain on “Lost Johnny”, “Vibrator” and “The Watcher” come across as naive punk-rock thrashings that could only thrill the hardest-of-hearing and most degenerate Motorhead fanatics, and the blasphemous borrowing of the standard “Train Kept a Rollin'” is hard to excuse too. There’s simply too much filler, speaking in favor of noise without substance, and on top of that it’s robbed of any real personality.
Every story has to start somewhere. Motorhead rolled out of the cradle with an expendable product, an album that, seen in the bigger picture, sank like a stone in the merciless whirlpool of the newly emerging scene. Of course, the debut stirred up enough interest on the local scene, and there must have been especially interesting moments when, out of the usual horde of rockers, punks and random passing satanists, i.e. the pile of regulars at Motorhead gigs, the shiny gleam of some skinhead’s nicely polished, hollow neck-topper suddenly cut into the eye. We can conclude that time has been kind to “Motorhead” mainly thanks to the fame and cult status of the later discography, without which Lemmy, truth be told, would surely have kicked the bucket long ago.
Lineup
Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister: vocals, bass
“Fast” Eddie Clarke: guitar
Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor: drums
Production
Speedy Keen
Tracklist
1. Motorhead
2. Vibrator
3. Lost Johnny
4. Iron Horse/Born to Lose
5. White Line Fever
6. Keep Us on the Road
7. The Watcher
8. Train Kept A-Rollin’
