Motörhead - The Best of Motörhead: Deaf Forever (1999)

Death, taxes, and Motörhead's seemingly indestructible Lemmy are some of life's only certainties, but almost as guaranteed are those yearly releases of mostly redundant "greatest-hits" sets mining the extensive catalog of these English metal legends. Famously abused over past decades due to early contractual blunders, this catalog has actually been given some measure of order -- and respect -- since it was corralled by Sanctuary in the early '00s; but that's hardly stopped them from keeping on with this questionable practice or reissues and re-packagings. 2007's Best of Motörhead: Deaf Forever represents an unfortunate relapse into such bad behavior, as its 20 tracks -- whilst uniformly fantastic by most any heavy metal definition -- in no way constitute a definitive collection of most popular Motörhead songs. The obligatory "Ace of Spades" leads off an initial parade of career essentials like "Bomber," "Iron Fist," and "Overkill," but these soon give way to a more nebulous sequence of would-be best-of candidates ("No Class," "Speed Freak," "The Chase Is Better Than the Catch," etc.), forgotten album tracks ("I'm the Doctor," "America," "All the Aces") and hard-to-find B-sides and oddities ("Dirty Love," "Lemmy Goes to the Pub"), which certainly have their place elsewhere, but not on a one-disc grouping such as this. Even so, first time Motörhead explorers could do a lot worse than Best of Motörhead: Deaf Forever, and, ironically, it may actually turn out to be a very decent selection of songs, when compared to next year's edition, and the following, and the following...