Published on Mar 16, 2004
I’ve said this in other reviews: there is no easy way to take
Motorhead’s complete history and bottle it up into a concise
“greatest hits” package. But in 1984,
No Remorse, a “best-of” with four new tracks (included at
the insistence of Lemmy Kilmister), comes damned close.
Practically everyone in the free world (or at least those of us
who bang our heads to metal with any frequency) knows “Ace Of
Spades,” the track which leads off this collection. (My CD copy,
issued by RoadRacer Revisited some years ago, leaves off two tracks
due to space limitations. I don’t know if recent re-issues have
fixed this.) Once you get the familiar out of the way, Kilmister
and crew bang through over 20 tracks which give the listener the
full gamut of Motorhead’s history and power leading up to their
“in-flux” state in 1984, with three new members (guitarists Phil
Campbell and Wurzel, and drummer Pete Gill) and no record label
deal.
Forgetting, for the briefest of moments, everything that
Motorhead has recorded since 1984, if you could only own one disc
of Motorhead’s, No Remorse would be the one to snag. The mixture of
tracks from their early, hungry days (“Overkill,” “No Class,” “Stay
Clean”) to their time at the top of the charts (“Jailbait,” “We Are
The Road Crew,” and the live takes on “Motorhead” and “Bomber”)
paints a clear picture of who Motorhead was at this stage in their
career: a band who refused to follow any set patterns and would
take the industry on with their own terms of warfare. It is, simply
put, a glorious noise that must be experienced.
Even as the band’s luck began to change for the worse (“Iron
Fist,” “Shine,” “Dancing On Your Grave”), Kilmister and crew
demonstrate that their ability to write solid metal tunes hadn’t
diminished. (Yes, this is coming from the same person who had
not-so-nice things to say about
Iron Fist and
Another Perfect Day — but even mired in the mediocrity of
those albums were some solid gold nuggets.) It all culminates in
the four tracks which feature Motorhead as a quartet, scattered
throughout the disc to keep listeners on their toes.
Of these new tracks, “Killed By Death” and “Locomotive” are
easily the cream of the crop, showing off a band who, even 10 years
after their birth, were pushing their own limits. “Locomotive”
hints at the speed and power which would become
Orgasmatron in 1986, while “Killed By Death” is a testament
to Kilmister’s songwriting skills. The other two, “Snaggletooth”
and “Steal Your Face,” aren’t bad per se, but they do pale in
comparison to the two barn-burners.
Also included in this set are two tracks from the “HeadGirl”
sessions, “Please Don’t Touch” and “Emergency” (the latter being
only the second instance of guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke handling
vocals). These are interesting pieces of history, if not strictly
Motorhead tracks, but they do fit the picture quite nicely.
No Remorse was the first official compilation of Motorhead’s
past glories, and it remains the best in terms of this portion of
their catalog. While all of Motorhead’s albums are worth investing
in, if you want to learn about the band, this is the ideal place to
start.