1. Overkill
2. Stay Clean
3. (I won’t) Pay your Price
4. I’ll be your Sister
5. Capricorn
6. No Class
7. Damage Case
8. Tear ya Down
9. Metropolis
10. Limb from Limb
Motörhead’s second album is a very different sounding record. It’s got the same rough and ready feel to it that the first album had, probably in part due to when and where it was recorded, but you can hear in the music that this is a band that are much more confident now in both their own and collective playing abilities. There are no duff songs on this record. We kick off with some proper classic songs. ‘Overkill’ is still to this day a mainstay of the live set and although it’s not one of my favourites it’s a great foot tapper. ‘Stay Clean’ is much better in my opinion. There’s still plenty of guitar solos on show and after four fast rock’n’roll numbers we get a nice change of pace with ‘Capricorn’, which slows things down a bit. Things get taken up a notch with ‘No Class’, another favourite of mine (and another live set mainstay). ‘Tear ya Down’ has a nice guitar solo and ‘Metropolis’ is great fun, mainly because the lyrics are total nonsense but coupled with the unrelenting rhythm of the music it somehow works and the record closes out with a nice final song. Overall this is a much, much stronger album than the previous one, a lot more great songs that have since become classics.
Next Album: BOMBER
Tuesday 18 January 2011
Monday 17 January 2011
The 'No Sleep Til "No Sleep Til Hammersmith" Project' Album 1 - Motörhead (1977)
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. The Train kept A-Rollin’
Motörhead’s eponymous first album is a real Blues/Rock’n’Roll hybrid. There are plenty of guitar solos but despite this overpowering the drums on a couple of tunes the three piece of Lemmy (Bass), ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke (Guitar) and Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor complement one anothers playing. The opening riff to ‘The Watcher’ sounds very similar to ‘Motorhead’ but is a very different song once the lyrics get under way. A very rough and ready album that sounds very unpolished compared with todays recordings but there is something nice about this. Something a bit more ‘real’, maybe less contrived. A lot of the songs are quite long but they all have very good rhythms and are great ‘foot tappers’. My favourite songs on this album are ‘Motorhead’, ‘Lost Johnny’ and ‘Keep us on the Road’.
Next album: OVERKILL
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. The Train kept A-Rollin’
Motörhead’s eponymous first album is a real Blues/Rock’n’Roll hybrid. There are plenty of guitar solos but despite this overpowering the drums on a couple of tunes the three piece of Lemmy (Bass), ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke (Guitar) and Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor complement one anothers playing. The opening riff to ‘The Watcher’ sounds very similar to ‘Motorhead’ but is a very different song once the lyrics get under way. A very rough and ready album that sounds very unpolished compared with todays recordings but there is something nice about this. Something a bit more ‘real’, maybe less contrived. A lot of the songs are quite long but they all have very good rhythms and are great ‘foot tappers’. My favourite songs on this album are ‘Motorhead’, ‘Lost Johnny’ and ‘Keep us on the Road’.
Next album: OVERKILL
Wednesday 12 January 2011
CENTURION - film review
I never got around to seeing this movie at the cinema but watched it last night on DVD so thought that was a perfect opportunity to scribble (I mean type but scribble sounds a bit more fun doesn’t it?) down a review.
Set in AD 117 the Picts have developed Guerrilla warfare to battle the invading Roman army, picking off outposts here and there. Centurion Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender) is captured after one raid and taken back to the Picts king. The Ninth Legion are despatched with a Mute guide Etain (Olga Kurylenko), to destroy the Picts but before they can do so they rescue Dias who has escaped and are then massacred (after being betrayed by Etain)apart from Dias and a few others. The General of the Ninth, Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) is captured and returned to the Picts for torture. The remaining Romans attempt a rescue of the General but fail and in the escape the Pict King’s son is murdered. In rage the King sends Etain and a party after the Romans with instructions to bring back their heads.
Neil Marshall’s fourth feature film has both the best cast he’s ever had and ironically this is also his weakest movie to date. His first, Dog Soldiers was a terrific low budget comedy horror with werewolves. His second, The Descent, was a scary, nasty and very gory affair and was quite brilliant. His third was the sadly much maligned (at least critically) Doomsday, which was highly derivative of Mad Max and 28 Days Later but was also bloody good fun. This film is bigger, but messier.
What I have described, briefly, above is pretty much what happens in the first thirty minutes of the movie. I’m all for a film moving fast but this is almost too fast and the film constantly feels as though someone in the editing suite has sacrificed any story or character scenes just to get to the next chase bit. This is where the film falls down for me. It’s just too messy. Also for me I thought the structure of the film could have been a little different, having the mission of the Ninth Legion forming the main crux of the plot and only kicking in with the chase/hunt element of the story for a terrific and pacey final thirty minutes or so. This way we could have built up some characters that the audience might have given a shit about rather than having the, admittedly well played by the actors, caricatures on show. For instance, Dias is the son of a Gladiator who was taught how to fight by his father (Good Grief) but chooses not to show any fighting prowess until quite late in the film. By rocketing through what plot there was in the first thirty minutes or thereabouts we suddenly find ourselves with a lot of screen time to pad out and the breakneck speed of the film comes crashing to a halt for a while, where we are subjected to numerous shots of men running and people giving chase on horseback.
This is a big shame as the film has some quite beautifully cinematography of the Scottish countryside and everything looks all nice and muddy and bloody. Dominic West has a ball as the General and is probably the most entertaining character on show. Olga Kurylenko’s role of the mute warrior woman Etain is also pretty impressive as she throws herself fully into a difficult role as a mute savage, but she is all wrath and fury and suits the role very well. Fassbender is okay but he’s pretty much playing the role as “the upper class British Officer”, or at least that’s how he sounds. He looks okay in the action but he’s been better. Noel Clarke is wasted in a role anyone could have played and Liam Cunningham and David Morrissey are very good in fairly thankless roles.
The saving grace for this film is the action. Neil Marshall has proved on his previous movies that he can do action and this does not disappoint at all. Considering this film is a 15 there is a hell of a lot of gore on show. Head are hacked off in bloody gouts of crimson, limbs sliced off, faces impaled with spears and arrows. There’s even a moment when a Roman is taking a leak and he is impaled with a wooden stake right in his genitals. All the battle scenes are full of blood and guts and it’s terrific. There were quite a few moments where I was exclaiming “Jesus” and “Fuuuuuuuuuck”. You know it’s good when I’m making comments like that when I’m watching.
To be fair this is a pretty ordinary film that’s well filmed but not very well put together in the final edit, the actors are generally all good in underwritten roles but the film is elevated from ‘waste of time’ to ‘well worth a rent’ due to buckets of gory violence. Fingers crossed that Neil Marshall’s next movie is far stronger affair.
Set in AD 117 the Picts have developed Guerrilla warfare to battle the invading Roman army, picking off outposts here and there. Centurion Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender) is captured after one raid and taken back to the Picts king. The Ninth Legion are despatched with a Mute guide Etain (Olga Kurylenko), to destroy the Picts but before they can do so they rescue Dias who has escaped and are then massacred (after being betrayed by Etain)apart from Dias and a few others. The General of the Ninth, Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) is captured and returned to the Picts for torture. The remaining Romans attempt a rescue of the General but fail and in the escape the Pict King’s son is murdered. In rage the King sends Etain and a party after the Romans with instructions to bring back their heads.
Neil Marshall’s fourth feature film has both the best cast he’s ever had and ironically this is also his weakest movie to date. His first, Dog Soldiers was a terrific low budget comedy horror with werewolves. His second, The Descent, was a scary, nasty and very gory affair and was quite brilliant. His third was the sadly much maligned (at least critically) Doomsday, which was highly derivative of Mad Max and 28 Days Later but was also bloody good fun. This film is bigger, but messier.
What I have described, briefly, above is pretty much what happens in the first thirty minutes of the movie. I’m all for a film moving fast but this is almost too fast and the film constantly feels as though someone in the editing suite has sacrificed any story or character scenes just to get to the next chase bit. This is where the film falls down for me. It’s just too messy. Also for me I thought the structure of the film could have been a little different, having the mission of the Ninth Legion forming the main crux of the plot and only kicking in with the chase/hunt element of the story for a terrific and pacey final thirty minutes or so. This way we could have built up some characters that the audience might have given a shit about rather than having the, admittedly well played by the actors, caricatures on show. For instance, Dias is the son of a Gladiator who was taught how to fight by his father (Good Grief) but chooses not to show any fighting prowess until quite late in the film. By rocketing through what plot there was in the first thirty minutes or thereabouts we suddenly find ourselves with a lot of screen time to pad out and the breakneck speed of the film comes crashing to a halt for a while, where we are subjected to numerous shots of men running and people giving chase on horseback.
This is a big shame as the film has some quite beautifully cinematography of the Scottish countryside and everything looks all nice and muddy and bloody. Dominic West has a ball as the General and is probably the most entertaining character on show. Olga Kurylenko’s role of the mute warrior woman Etain is also pretty impressive as she throws herself fully into a difficult role as a mute savage, but she is all wrath and fury and suits the role very well. Fassbender is okay but he’s pretty much playing the role as “the upper class British Officer”, or at least that’s how he sounds. He looks okay in the action but he’s been better. Noel Clarke is wasted in a role anyone could have played and Liam Cunningham and David Morrissey are very good in fairly thankless roles.
The saving grace for this film is the action. Neil Marshall has proved on his previous movies that he can do action and this does not disappoint at all. Considering this film is a 15 there is a hell of a lot of gore on show. Head are hacked off in bloody gouts of crimson, limbs sliced off, faces impaled with spears and arrows. There’s even a moment when a Roman is taking a leak and he is impaled with a wooden stake right in his genitals. All the battle scenes are full of blood and guts and it’s terrific. There were quite a few moments where I was exclaiming “Jesus” and “Fuuuuuuuuuck”. You know it’s good when I’m making comments like that when I’m watching.
To be fair this is a pretty ordinary film that’s well filmed but not very well put together in the final edit, the actors are generally all good in underwritten roles but the film is elevated from ‘waste of time’ to ‘well worth a rent’ due to buckets of gory violence. Fingers crossed that Neil Marshall’s next movie is far stronger affair.
Tuesday 11 January 2011
The "No Sleep Til 'No Sleep Til Hammersmith' Project"
The plan for this little project is to listen to all 20 studio albums by Motorhead (the greatest rock'n'roll band on earth) in order, starting with the selftitled first one (Motorhead in case you're not paying attention) and moving on to the most recent one, The World is Yours which is due out in the shops on Monday 17th January.
I'm aiming to listen to one album per night for consecutive nights and once I've had a listen I'll jot what will amount to a mini review about the album. I'll mention my favourite songs, things I don't like it and any other thoughts that spring into my head (change in the line up of the band, that sort of thing).
Some of the early albums have been re-released over the years with extra or 'bonus' tracks on them. I won't be listening to these, just the songs that were on the albums on first release.
Once I've done all 20 albums I will be concluding the project with the number one live album 'No Sleep Til Hammersmith'.
The idea for this came about when I bought and then listened to The World is Yours before Christmas. Classic Rock magazine were doing a special CD and magazine release early of the album in case you were wondering how I got my hands on it before it's in the shops.
Other than that I just thought "why the fuck not?"
I'm aiming to listen to one album per night for consecutive nights and once I've had a listen I'll jot what will amount to a mini review about the album. I'll mention my favourite songs, things I don't like it and any other thoughts that spring into my head (change in the line up of the band, that sort of thing).
Some of the early albums have been re-released over the years with extra or 'bonus' tracks on them. I won't be listening to these, just the songs that were on the albums on first release.
Once I've done all 20 albums I will be concluding the project with the number one live album 'No Sleep Til Hammersmith'.
The idea for this came about when I bought and then listened to The World is Yours before Christmas. Classic Rock magazine were doing a special CD and magazine release early of the album in case you were wondering how I got my hands on it before it's in the shops.
Other than that I just thought "why the fuck not?"
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