Day 0842 - Vanishing Point

Primal Scream "Vanishing Point" (1997)

I really enjoyed Primal Scream's "Screamadelica" album where they combined rock sounds, dance sounds, and the in between 'baggy' sound.   As much as I enjoy musical variety, I felt that some of the electronic tracks didn't really sit along the more guitar-based songs, possibly it's because it was a fairly new direction for the band and they hadn't quite worked out how to properly integrate everything.   Colour me pleased then that this album still mixes its sounds but seems to have found more of a balance across the album.

The album is named after a film of the same name that the band loved.   They felt that the film's score was a bit too much like hippy music for a film about speed-jacked cross-country car antics and sought to reimagine this at least for the track "Kowalski" (the main character).  

The album also manages to work in the trip-hoppy jazz of "Get Duffy", the rock sound of "Medication", the Krautrock of "Stuka", a slightly dance-infused cover of Motörhead's eponymous track, and the 60s-spy-music-evolving-into jazzy-trip-hop-voyage of penultimate track "Trainspotting".  

Excellent album, liking what I'm hearing and should probably check out at least the album between "Screamadelica" and "Vanishing Point" some time.

Day 0482 - No Sleep 'til Hammersmith

Motörhead "No Sleep 'til Hammersmith" (1981)

A pretty solid live album.  I've said it before, I'm not the biggest fan of live albums.  This one works though, given that their albums are pretty down and dirty and lacking studio 'sheen' so this is just a raw representation of what they do, with the extra sweat and intensity of it being laid out live, and maybe a little faster.

The Motörhead ethos is clearly spelt out with the liner notes which include the dedication

"Thanks to Smirnoff and Carlsberg without whom lots of this would have been coherent."

Day 0463 - Ace of Spades

Motörhead "Ace of Spades" (1980)

Lemmy, having been kicked out of Hawkwind for taking too much speed, went on to start a band that seems like the musical equivalent of that drug.

I quite enjoyed the band's slightly less intense self-titled debut album, but it's hard to deny the power and immediacy of the lightning fast riffage, crazed intensity and throat tearing yells of these tracks. One of the initial building blocks of metal, but also beloved by punks at the time.