New Music Review – Motorhead: Aftershock

                Some bands lose their way.  They try too hard to change with the times, to be relevant.  When these bands return to the kind of music that got them their fame and notoriety in the first place they are hailed as “returning champions” and everyone tells them that it’s good to have them back doing what they do best.  There are then bands that unapologetically go about their business day after day, year after year, consistently making albums with similar, if not the same sound.  Motorhead falls into that second group.  The band has been in existence for a long time, and aside from technological advancements, you could line up tracks from Ace of Spades, Snake Bite Love and their newest offering Aftershock and there’s a good chance that you wouldn’t be able to nail down a time period in which the songs were released. 

                This approach by Motorhead, a basic “fuck you” to record execs that probably wanted something a bit more hair-metally in the 80s and more Grunge-tastic in the 90s is one of the most endearing traits of the band.  They are going to make Motorhead music and they don’t really care what you or anyone else has to say about it.  This is what we get with Aftershock, another unapologetic Motorhead album.  The fact that it basically sounds like any other Motorhead album from the last fifteen years is both a blessing and a curse. 

                This album is very consistent throughout, there are no real peaks and valleys in terms of the content (something you would hope would be the case with seasoned veterans like Lemmy and company) but the fact that it is such a baseline album, makes it kind of boring for lack of a better term.  I may be a little jaded still by the fact that I was duped into buying the live albums The World is Ours volumes one and two (which turn out to be basically the same album because the concert setlists vary only a little from show to show) thinking that I would be getting a definitive Motorhead live experience.  I was disappointed by that and to say that hasn’t colored my judgment even a little bit would be a lie.  The songs on the record are all well done as expected, and there is something to be said for a band at this late stage in their careers consistently putting out new music every two or three years.  However, at this point I could put in any of their more recent albums and hear pretty much the same thing.  It’s almost as if Motorhead went into the recording studio ten years ago and banged out a couple dozen tracks that they have just been putting together into different albums every two years or so.  You will often see little variations from album to album when it comes to most artists, with Motorhead though; consistency is the main focus, whether it’s on their studio releases or the banter in their concerts.  They wrote the script long ago and they aren’t straying from it.  They are formulaic to a fault.

                This is a good album to have in a Motorhead-playlist but it doesn’t really distinguish itself from any of its predecessors.  I’m not asking for a Motorhead Christmas album or something that drastic, but save for two or three songs tops, the album sounds way too similar to me.  It’s not a bad album by any means, and if you are going to listen to a modern Motorhead album, this one is as good as any, but after hearing stellar new offerings from Pearl Jam and Black Sabbath this year, I expected more.