Motörhead – Clean Your Clock (June 10, 2016)

They were the Kings of the Road. They lived on it. They loved it. It loved them. And never was the spirit of Motörhead more alive than when they were on tour, shake, rattle and rolling audiences to within an inch of their lives thanks to that indomitable cocktail of power, purpose, and head-crunching volume. Yeah. In fact, after four decades of bone-pulverizing duty, Motörhead were still enjoying sold-out gigs worldwide. On November 20th and 21st 2015, at the Zenith in Munich, Germany, UDR Records made the decision to record. Consulting with the band’s longtime studio producer Cameron Webb to make sure the technical specs were as good as they could be, Motörhead proceeded to deliver two storming shows. Where there had once been almost-too-fast breakneck pace, there was measured yet still thunderous rock’n’roll served up only as they could, Phil Campbell playing better than he had in years, and Mikkey Dee elevating the art of drumming to the superlative heights which made him one of metal’s most coveted skinsmen. Lemmy. Oh, he sounds so dialed in, a little mean even (in the best possible way) snarling here and there, cackling when appropriate, and singing in a way which will defy every single pre-conceived expectation you might have had. Yes, he was fighting ailments. Yes, he was fighting the sadness of losing Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor. But no, he was not flimsy or faded, in fact, on Clean Your Clock he lays down the marker for all near-70-year-olds in terms of wicked badassery. Those first strains of the mighty “Bomber” are like a salve to all heavy metal souls, the reverberant classic forcing you to turn it up, Lemmy snarling and roaring like a man in his 20’s, “Metropolis” grooving like the day it was written, and “Overkill” as mighty a pulverizer as ever…look, here is the unavoidable truth. There will be no more Motörhead tours because Lemmy is no longer here, and many, many people did not get a chance to hear them one more time on what proved to be their last-ever piece of road work. Which makes Clean Your Clock a vitally important release. It is both a celebration and an epitaph, glorious yet not without melancholy. It had to sound right, as with all Motörhead releases, but this one was arguably more important than any of the others. Webb has done the show, and the band, proud by helping make sure the power of the band is not lost in some digital sinkhole, maintaining the warmth and curve of Motörhead’s unique live sound. Clean Your Clock is the natural sound of one of rock’n’roll’s mightiest, rarest and most astoundingly excellent beasts – Motörhead. There isn’t a plaudit they haven’t received and there isn’t a plaudit they don’t deserve. And if there had to be a ‘final’ Motörhead album, perhaps it is fitting that Clean Your Clock, a superb live encapsulation of the band at home, is the one. So TURN-THIS-UP because as Lemmy himself said, the only way to feel the noise is when it’s good and loud…(from Amazon)