The ‘No Sleep Til “No Sleep Til Hammersmith” Project’ Album 2 – Overkill (1978)

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