Warfare - The Lemmy Sessions

After stints in several bands including Major Accident, The Blood and Angelic Upstarts, drummer and vocalist Evo wanted to form a band who fused “heavy metal riffs with punk lyrics”.  In 1984 he left the Angelic Upstarts, recruited bassist Falken and guitarist Gunnar, and formed Warfare, releasing their debut album later that year.  In January of 1985, during a show by Tank at Dingwall’s in London, Evo approached Lemmy and told him that he would be producing the next Warfare album (there was some asking too, as detailed in the essay included here).  The resulting CD, Metal Anarchy, is considered by many to be the pinnacle of their career.  In addition to a newly remastered version of that release, this new three CD set, The Lemmy Sessions, includes the recently discovered and previously unreleased “rough mix” by Lemmy taken from the original cassette given to Evo to approve before the final mix, and a third disc containing the Two Tribes and Total Death EPs and bonus track “Two Tribes (From Hell Mix)” (all also newly remastered) that were released prior to recording the album.  

Following a short distorted musical snippet from The Sound Of Music, Metal Anarchy (disc two here) gets going with “Electric Mayhem”, a pummeling tune that sets the tone for the rest of the album, with equal parts raw garage rock, early punk and plenty of Motorhead influenced rock.  While there are variations like the slower passages in “Warfare”, the super heavy drums, raw rock and punk vocal delivery of “Disgrace” and the gorgeous jangly guitar opening of “Military Shadow”, which then hits you upside the head, for the most part they stick pretty close to the core sound of the opener.  Ironically, even though the songs are heavy and a bit ragged, they almost always maintain a strong sense of melody. In addition to production by Lemmy, Würzel (Motorhead guitarist at that time) plays guitar on the title track.  With it being an almost forty year old cassette the rough mixes found on disc one do have some tape dropouts from time to time, but overall the sound quality is surprisingly good.  All nine tracks from the album are here and it makes for interesting glimpse behind the curtain.

Disc three kicks off with The Two Tribes EP and their take on the Frankie Goes To Hollywood title track.  They definitely give it the brutal Warfare punch, but still maintain the hooks of the original.  The other two tracks on the EP were songs that had been in their live set for a while, the hard charging “Hell” and “Blown To Bits”, the latter of which was originally written for their debut album.  Next up is the Total Death EP, which was produced by Algy Ward, founder of the band Tank and former member of the Damned.  The EP opens with an early version of “Metal Anarchy”, which is a strong version, just a little less polished. Even though the remaining three EP tracks are remastered they still sound fairly muddy and musically seem a little repetitive and are definitely the weak point of this collection.  Closing out the disc is the From Hell mix of “Two Tribes”.  The Lemmy Sessions is an outstanding box set covering this high point in Warfare's history and also includes a great booklet with photos and a very informative interview with Evo.    

(HNE Recordings)