CoronaVinyl Day 44 (Metal): Ace of Spades by Motörhead

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is metal, and I'm going with an album that I highlighted a couple weeks ago in my Tuesday Top Ten on the Metal Albums of 1980:  Motörhead's Ace of Spades.  This is yet another album where the album cover is hanging on my wall of records in my office.

The gravelly voiced lead singer and bassist Lemmy Kilmister formed Motörhead in 1975, soon after bringing on board guitarist "Fast Eddie" Clarke and drummer Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor.  Over the next forty years, the band (with a few lineup changes, though never without Lemmy) released 22 studio albums and influenced a generation of hard rock and heavy metal bands in the process with its rapid-fire mix of metal, punk, and rock.

While Ace of Spades was Motörhead's fourth studio album, it was the first one released in the U.S., and it was a classic, arguably becoming the band's most iconic album -- and it certainly contained the band's most well-known song, the title track, which reached #15 on the UK pop charts in 1980 and then #13 in January 2016, right after Lemmy died.  While the album didn't chart in the U.S., it was their highest-charting studio album in their native UK, reaching #4 on the UK album charts (their live album, No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, released in 1981, would hit #1).

The Spotify version of the album is the one that I have on CD that includes three bonus tracks that are not on the original album -- "Dirty Love," which was the B-side to the "Ace of Spades" single, and two of the three songs from the band's St. Valentine's Day Massacre EP collaboration with Girlschool, "Emergency" and "Please Don't Touch" (the latter of which is one of my ten favorite '80s collaboration songs).

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Love Me Like a Reptile"
"Love Me Like a Reptile" is my favorite song on the album.  It's a fast-paced song about imploring a woman to lay eggs, so that the man can then fertilize them, I assume.  Then again, I have no idea how reptiles make love or if they're even capable of the emotion of love.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "The Chase is Better Than the Catch"
The title is one of the better lessons in love and pursuit of intimate relations.  Sometimes, you try to get something for so long, and then when you finally get it, you're all, Damn, I was too busy trying to bed [her/him] that I didn't even realize that [bitch/sumbitch] is crazy.  It seems I was in a better position physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually prior to when I discovered that [she/he] is a silver-tongued devil, demon lech."  Or, as Lemmy once put it, "sometimes the face is better than the snatch."