Overkill? Lemmy lived and breathed overkill. The bass line here is classic Lemmy, and it’s not their most intense number, but it’s definitely one that can get your heart pounding and your head banging. I love the false finish that leads into the jam at the end… and then the second false finish that leads into the jam at the end, which has a vaguely BOC-ish sound to the guitar.
Cover songs have always been hit-or-miss with Lemmy & Co. Thankfully, Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” is right up his alley – simple, raw, and powerful. It’s a true highlight of their otherwise underwhelming March ör Die album, which incidentally was being recorded when the Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles. Lemmy later told Classic Rock magazine: “I was doing a vocal and I finished and came into the lounge, and there was a TV on that was showing a house burning – I looked out the window and I saw the other side of the same house. Driving out of there was like driving through a war zone, as the whole city block was on fire. Everything went dark and all you could see was entire city blocks burning. It was fucking great.”
Thanks for that Dio song btw, I’d never heard that one before.
Here’s a track I rediscovered a few weeks ago and have been playing nearly every day since then (featuring Lemmy on bass):
I’m just familiar enough with Wilhelm Reich and his theories to understand what they’re singing about here. It’s all quack-science mumbo-jumbo, of course, but it fits perfectly with the space-rock instrumentals. One can’t help but love how optimistic they sound singing about a Next Big Thing that turned out to be utter nonsense.
Lemmy was always at his best playing basic, simple rock’n’roll, be it acoustic blues or “Louie Louie” cranked to eleven. This concert proves rockabilly falls well within that umbrella. Good guitarist, too.
Time for the deepest of deep cuts:
This reminds me more of the Who circa-Quadrophenia, with a touch of AC/DC, than it sounds like anything that Motorhead would ever have recorded. Of course, it’s from the era where Motorhead was still a work-in-progress, but the lyrics are close enough to something Lemmy would have written or sung, so it doesn’t feel entirely out of place. It’s weird to hear Lemmy reduced just to playing rhythm bass - I need to find out if Motorhead ever did this song live so I can compare the way they did it in concert to the laid-back performance we hear here.
Moving on from Motorhead with a modern band that throws back to a different genre from that same era;
“Fools” was a song by Pink Fairies, the previous band of Larry Wallis, the original guitarist. (Motorhead’s debut album mostly covered songs from their previous bands, Pink Fairies & Hawkwind.) I don’t think they ever played it live – when they re-recorded their debut with Fast Eddie Clarke, this song was not included. What a direction they could have taken, huh?
Nice wall of sound!! The music is great, sounding like a rave-up of country & blues with big band horns and a dash of metal thrown in. The only thing I don’t like are the vocals, which sound overwrought and somewhat forced to my ears; it does fit the music though, and she’s definitely got serious talent, so I can see why people like this. It’s reminiscent of “Spiderwebs” by No Doubt.
OK, rather intense prog-metal (at least there’s no Cookie Monsters)-melodic, about a betrayal of sorts. The vocals are a bit cutesy, but I like.
So, in that vein…
“She”, for the record, is Eric Nally, who recently sang the hook on Macklemore’s new single which was mentioned a page or two ago. He does get a bit falsetto at parts in the song, so I can see how you took for him for a woman, but I just figured I’d point it out.
Not bad. The intro and the general feel of the instrumentals reminds me of Golden Earring, but the lyrics/vocals are more Depeche Mode. A little too emo for my tastes overall and it kind of meanders on without reaching any sort of crescendo or climax, but with some remixing you could probably make some good somber club music out of this.
Joy Division belong to the genre I like to call “Bands people who were cooler than me listened to in high school.” Because they and others liked them sailed over my head at the time, it’s been slow going trying to appreciate them now that I’m at the age of regularly wearing slippers around the house. But this works for me. A lot of those early alternative bands made a virtue of the fact that they were so technically limited — and here I’m looking at you, Bauhaus — but these guys know what they’re doing; there’s some good playing under the broodiness.
Was vaguely familiar with this band years ago, or so I thought-akin to Single Gun Theory, thought they’d be more jangle poppy, instead more sublime, downtempo, and danceable.
LOL at Smapti calling Fields of the Nephilim “too emo” and then posting Joy Division. 
Creepy and mysterious – sounds like it could work as the soundtrack to a vampire romance. Hard to tell if they’re singing in English, Latin, or both.
Emo was posted. I responded in kind. 
I absolutely love this. The drum & bass intro is excellent. The Reznor/Tool-esque vocals work very well here, and along with the guitar (which isn’t very technically impressive, but works well in context of the music) they build up to the final verse nicely.
Voivod are amazing!! Even in their early thrash metal days, they would infuse their music with polyrhythmic drums and chromatic guitar riffs that made their music stand out from the crowd. This song (a Pink Floyd cover) comes from the album where their music became more psychedelic and mainstream, yet still with a rough and menacing edge. Way back in the day, I played this song for a friend who was a huge Pink Floyd fan, and he liked it, despite hating heavy metal in general. R.I.P. Piggy (1959-2005)
This song really takes too long to get to the song part of the song. The intro is the sort of thing that probably sounded cool and sci-fi-ish back in the day, but just comes off as dated now. The drumbeat is compelling, but lyrically it’s sparse, the industrial sound effects aren’t all that impressive in comparison to what NIN was doing around this same time, and the guitar is just sorta there. I don’t actively dislike this, but it’s a solid “meh” overall, I’m afraid.
Rangy guitar, solid drum work, I wish the vocals didn’t sound like they were coming out of a tin can. The BOC version is better, I think.
Never really got into Bad Religion back in the day, but I like the musicianship on this song and the Irish-folk-ish flow of the lyrics. I get the impression that the singer is meant to be Jesus in his “Why have you forsaken me?” moment, which is definitely an interesting spin on the grand tradition of punk singers wailing about how their fathers messed up their lives.
I’ll jump in real quick with an aside. It’s a retelling of the Old Testament story of Job, with many of the verse lyrics drawn from or inspired by Job’s soliloquies in the book. BR did this a few times (“Skyscraper” is the story of the Tower of Babel) and it’s interesting to see a bunch of educated but irreligious guys approach these stories purely as literature and moral fables.
Modern mellow R&B rather reminiscent of Michael Jackson in both style and vocals. I’m not DLing but I can appreciate where it is coming from.
Late '80s pop-rock with a vaguely Steinman/Bonnie Tyler-ish feel to it. The singer is asking a lost love what they think of when they remember the time when they were together, but she’s asking herself as well, because she knows those days are in the past and she can’t reclaim them any more than she can un-melt a snowflake.
In a similar vein;
Jackson Browne is so good. It’s a style of music - that country/rock thing that happened in the 70s - that really isn’t my favorite, but he’s just such a great songwriter, singer, and producer that I find him totally listenable.
I mean, The Eagles totally strip-mined the sound of Jackson Browne (and Rick Nelson and a few others) on the way to being one of the best-selling bands of all time, yet I can’t fucking stand them. Browne’s craft is just on another level.
Next: Blondie, “Maria”