Motörhead
March or Die

THE REVIEW

Given the recent review of BASTARDS (1993), I would like to review this album released a year earlier, to position the artistic period of LEMMY and company.

They ended the '80s with the critically and publicly panned "ROCK'N'ROLL" (1987), recently reevaluated by MOTORHEAD themselves by reintroducing some tracks live, and entered the new decade with the solid "1916" (1991). The albums released in this period, three in three years, are characterized by a more hard rock feel replacing the speed of execution and classic Motorhead immediacy.

"MARCH OR DIE" was released a year after "1916" with a slight lineup change. The unbalanced PHILTY ANIMAL TAYLOR left the drums and was replaced by the "MASTIFF" MIKKEY DEE, who remains to this day.

The album opens with the hard rock STAND, a classic MOTORHEAD mid-tempo, followed by a solid cover of CAT SCRATCH FEVER, a signature track of that crazy TED NUGENT.
Another mid-tempo with BAD RELIGION, then the speed picks up with the faster JACK THE RIPPER.
The fifth track offers a small surprise, a ballad, I AIN'T NO NICE GUY, sung by LEMMY together with his friend OZZY OSBOURNE. From this album onwards, slower and acoustic songs would appear more frequently in album tracklists, although not always the "raspy voice" of LEMMY would perfectly adapt.

To affirm the strong bond between LEMMY and OZZY, the sixth track is HELLRAISER, written by the two together with ZAKK WYLDE and already present on the MADMAN's NO MORE TEARS (1991). The song would become a minor hit of the period.

ASYLUM CHOIR and TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE are two solid hard-rock'n'roll songs, YOU BETTER RUN is based on a classic yet trivial blues riff, and NAME IN VAIN is the fastest on the album, which concludes with the war march driven by Lemmy's commanding voice.

Transitional album then, if such a thing can be said of a band like MOTORHEAD, which never succumbed to radical changes in their sound except for some slight modifications sometimes poorly received. This would be followed by BASTARDS (1993) and the excellent SACRIFICE (1995), in my opinion, the artistic peak of the nineties.