Arriving a mere seven months after their second album, Overkill, which was released in March 1979, Motörhead put out their third album, Bomber, in October of 1979. It doesn't take very long to understand why the band only included one song ("Bomber") from this album in their setlist for the Ace of Spades tour (which resulted in the No Sleep 'til Hammersmith live album) and only two ("Bomber" and "Stone Dead Forever") on the more expansive No Remorse compilation. While undeniably Motörhead, the band sounds tired and short on ideas on Bomber. Lemmy's singing sounds even more strained than normal on "All the Aces" and "Talking Head," like the gnarly things that passed for his vocal cords are on their last legs, a lot of the riffs are recycled, and the choruses are rarely more than the song titles repeated. Surely "Bomber" is a great track, as is "Stone Dead Forever," ass-kicking, Motörhead anthems that rank among their best early songs. Both "Talking Head" and "All the Aces" are decent enough tracks as well, nothing special, but good enough while on. However, the rest of Bomber is not much more than filler, the kind of faceless hard rock/heavy metal that sounds fine on the PA at a club in between lives sets but doesn't really stand up to closer scrutiny. To top things off, the production isn't as good as on Overkill, muddy and flat. At the end of the day, this is a Motörhead album and that means it isn't awful, but there are a lot of albums in their catalog to choose from, many better than Bomber.
