Motörhead – Kiss Of Death – 20th Anniversary Edition
Motörhead- Kiss Of Death – 20th Anniversary Edition
BMG
Release date: 03/07/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
9/10
Twenty years on and it’s STILL louder than everything else.
Oh Lord, who hast made the tape machine and the little half-speed dials thereupon,
Who lookest with favour upon the remastering engineer, that he might toil in his booth and bring forth clarity from the old tapes,
We beseech Thee, watch over these tracks as they cross into their third decade,
Grant them fidelity, grant them warmth, and grant the man doing the pressing a decent tea break,
For it is a long job, Lord, and he has asked for very little
Motörhead’s Kiss of Death, 20th Anniversary Edition. Before discussing this Motörhead album, one should note that Phil Campbell, whose playing you can hear on the recording, won’t be able to listen to it because he has been dead since March. He spent three months in intensive care due to the surgical operation. Hence, it’s not about a humorous approach to preparing jokes, because it’s the reality of this particular moment. Dave Ling covers this quite properly, given that Campbell worked with Lemmy’s cement mixer on LSD for thirty-one years. We will talk about humor later, but only where it belongs because Motörhead finds death very funny up to the point when it becomes a real thing.
It is 2006, since this is the year when the album was issued. Kiss of Death is Motörhead’s eighteenth studio album, and this is everything about the band in one sentence, since Motörhead never stopped playing. Being the direct follow-up of the Inferno album, this album presents a typical Motörhead combination of Lemmy, Campbell, and Mikkey Dee doing something that they had been doing from the Big Bang onwards: playing louder and faster than the laws. ‘Sucker’ greets you right away, with Mikkey Dee drumming as if he is trying to defuse bombs while insulting them for their stupidity at the same time. There is no introduction on this album, no overture which would allow Motörhead to arrange your seats.
You get ‘Over The Top’, and you are thrown to the deep end of an amplifier-filled swimming pool, and you should either swim or get bruised, with both options considered success.
‘One Night Stand’ follows and lives up to the promise – no need to search for metaphors in this case. Lemmy performs the whole song with the typical weariness and lack of interest in anything else, as if it’s the song that he tried many times and can confirm it personally.
‘Devil I Know’ is the point when the album tries to develop some moral conscience but remembers how it sounds and turns back to becoming extremely loud. And this is a proper thing, since conscience has never once improved a Motörhead song. ‘Trigger’ is the song where Campbell’s playing looks not simply aggressive but personally offended at the very concept of silence, where Motörhead is so ridiculously Motörhead that it becomes a parody of itself and then kills the parody due to playing with the name.
Then you have ‘Under the Gun,’ and it’s at this point when the album earns its reputation instead of getting it by reputation. ‘God Was Never on Your Side’ is as close as possible to Motörhead’s thesis statement, and it’s performed by Lemmy with a voice that is like gravel having a driving license and a grudge. The voice, not the shout, not the performance – it’s said like you’d say while reading a weather report if the weather was disappointingly consistent. The song is the fan favorite for a reason because it doesn’t try to be clever about its nihilism; it just is it, full-grown and ready to go, with no assembly required. Mike Inez somehow ends up on this album, apparently confusing himself and taking a wrong exit off a touring bus and ending up in the middle of a war zone. It must be said that he adapts quite well to the situation, but this must be admitted to him. C.C. DeVille (of Poison) joins the band in other songs with the look of a man hearing that there was a party and coming with the completely inappropriate shoes. It’s true with the recording style of the band: comfort was never included in the brief.
‘Living in the Past and ‘Christine’ continue spinning the wheels of the album without overheating it to self-parody, while ‘Sword of Glory’ does exactly what it should be doing according to its name: it sounds like a medieval battle fought with Marshall stacks. “Be My Baby” is featured here in its studio version, and then resurfaces on the live disc, which either means that the band loved performing it or somebody in the setlist meetings just forgot that they had chosen this song, and frankly, with this band, both options look equally plausible. ‘Kingdom of the Worm’ and ‘Going Down’ are closing the main body of the album in the way closing tracks of the Motörhead album are contractually obligated to do: they sound exactly as tired and exactly as unapologetic as the whole rest of the album. Then, of course, ‘R.A.M.O.N.E.S.’ pops up, the 2006 re-recording of the tribute to another band that wouldn’t slow down until it became impossible for biology.
The bonus material also sounds fine – A cover of Metallica’s ‘Whiplash’ as the CD extra plus a live recording of ‘R.A.M.O.N.E.S’ – and then you get to disc two, Live at Lowlands Festival 2007, for the first time existing on vinyl in the history of this album’s release. This is the point where the anniversary edition is justified. ‘Snaggletooth’ and ‘Stay Clean’ begin the performance with the crowd that seems to have waited for its whole life for the permission to lose its mind, and Motörhead gives it.
‘Killers’ and ‘Metropolis’ reveal a band that, in live performances, sounds even more dangerous than on the studio albums, less produced and more like a real physical threat for your ears. ‘Over the Top’ and ‘In the Name of Tragedy’ continue the energy of the live performance, and by the time you get to ‘Killed by Death,’ you’ll notice that there is some black comedy hidden in the title of the song, which the band obviously noticed decades before the release of this album in 2026 could make it realize that. They knew that. They always did. That’s actually the point of being Motörhead – you create the entire aesthetic of grinning at your mortality, and then eventually your mortality gets tired of the joke and takes the bet. ‘Aces of Spades’ closes the live recording of the concert in the way it closes every Motörhead show: like men who believe that they will get away with everything forever.
They couldn’t, of course. Lemmy was gone in 2015. Phil Campbell was gone this March, thirty-one years of serving a band that treated the exhaustion as a choice, not a warning. What is left is this: a half-speed remaster making the original tapes sound like they’ve been polished with actual malice, a live disc recorded nineteen years ago and finally existing on vinyl, and the liner notes which somehow manage to be a genuine tribute without turning the whole package into the wake. This is still a tremendously loud, sometimes embarrassing but always committed record, the kind of album your dad plays at your wedding too loud and yet totally correctly. This is also now inevitably elegiac in a way it was never intended to be and never asked to become.
Track list:
CD1- Kiss of Death (20th Anniversary Ed.)
01. Sucker
02. One Night Stand
03. Devil I Know
04. Trigger
05. Under the Gun
06. God Was Never on Your Side
07. Living in the Past
08. Christine
09. Sword of Glory
10. Be My Baby
11. Kingdom of the Worm
12. Going Down
13. R.A.M.O.N.E.S (2006 Version)
CD Bonus track
14. Whiplash CD Bonus track
15. R.A.M.O.N.E.S (Live) CD Bonus track
CD2- Live at Lowlands Festival, 2007
01. Snaggletooth
02. Stay Clean
03. Be My Baby
04. Killers
05. Metropolis
06. Over The Top
07. One Night Stand
08. In The Name Of Tragedy
09. I Got Mine
10. Going To Brazil
11. Killed By Death
12. Aces Of Spades
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