CD of the Year: Motörhead - The World is Yours

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There were other contenders for my favourite album of 2011. Nicolas Jaar’s electronic odyssey Space is Only Noise certainly pushes towards imaginative sonic frontiers in ways nobody could accuse Motörhead of doing, and The Death Set, bratty noiseniks from Australia via New York, demonstrated on Michel Poiccard just what a brilliant racket can be made by lacing punk rock attitude with electronic thunder. In the end, though, as other albums came and went, The World is Yours sat in my car stereo’s 10 CD changer from January until December and I hammered it. It gave me the most pleasure of all.

2011 was not kind to me but the host of vulnerable troubadours touting their pain in theatrical broken voices didn’t appeal. If you’re going through hell, keep going, don’t bore me with it to a sub-James Taylor/Jeff Buckley template. The World is Yours, as well as being Motörhead’s best album since 1916, 20 years ago, sticks an unapologetic two fingers up to, well, almost everything. It’s an album that fills me with verve every time.

There’s one naff song, the lame Quo-ish “Rock’n’Roll Music”, but the rest, with Wagnerian Göttererdämmerung spirit, sounds like a last stand, a tight knot of rock’n’roll, metal, punk and hyper-speed rhythm’n’blues. Lemmy is at its heart, sounding world-weary but unapologetic. Full of fire, he growls out cris de coeur such as “Get Back In Line” and “I Know How To Die”, conjures macho Peckinpah brutality on “Outlaw” and doomed, Tolkien-esque mythology on the rip-roaring “Devils in my Head”. From opener “Born to Lose” to the closing “Bye Bye Bitch Bye Bye”, it all emanates invigorating resentful gutsiness.

With Welsh riff-meister Phil Campbell on guitar and Swedish powerhouse Mikkey Dee on drums, Motörhead are as tight as they’ve ever been. They certainly aren’t doing anything new but that’s not always the point, is it? They do Motörhead impeccably and right now their driven grit, their earthed ire, rather than media-friendly irony and i-Phone sleekness, are just what the doctor ordered.

Watch Motorhead deal with the bankers in the video for "Get Back in Line"

Comments

In my opinion this is not the best motörhead album in twenty years, have you been listening their "inferno" album from 2004? Could be the best MH - album of them all. And don´t forget the magnificent "Bastards" album from 1994, if we talking about the best MH - album in twenty years. Fact is that this band have done a lot of real good albums and I would like to say that even "Motorizer" from 2008 is better than "The world is yours". I think "the world is yours" is just a "standard delivery" but a damn good standard delivery!

Excellent review. I Know What You Need is my favorite track, the intro/main riff is exquisite (an impossible punk groove) followed by Devils in My Head, Get Back in Line, I Know How to Die, Brotherhood of Man, Born to Lose and By Bye Bitch By Bye. Is great to find someone who understands what I understand. This is the greatest record anybody made this year and you don't even have to listen to anything else to know it. Motorhead is truth, recognizable when heard. Is just not possible to do better than what Motorhead is doing with Cameron Webb and what Cameron Webb is doing with Motorhead. Cameron took Motorhead and gave it the sound it deserved, realized it's highest potential to create absolute perfection, euphoria, pleasure, rage, joy, power. Four albums now of the most perfect rock sound ever made followed only by AC/DC's Back In Black and Led Zeppelin IV.