HOARD ALMIGHTY
Box sets, underground oddities and all the essential merch you need this month
MOTÖRHEAD
THE LÖST TAPES: THE COLLECTION VOLUMES 1-5
BMG £50 / £75
EVEN IN DEATH, Motörhead are the gift that keep on giving. Retrieved from Lemmy’s vast store of live tape recordings, and eventually identified by notes he’d left behind, the five European concerts collected here, spanning 13 years, have already been released digitally – and four of them on vinyl – but never before as a box set. True purists might have wanted them in their original cassette form, but most of us want to actually play the damn things, and the semi-matt, gatefold sleeves, with a unified reel-to-reel case design (y’know, for the ultra-purists), housing these eight CDs still feels talismanic. From the Madrid show in ’95, full of raw power like they’re played via a rusty nail used as a stylus, to shows from Norwich, Malmö, Heilbronn and finally Download Festival in 2008 (now also released on vinyl and in a bonus bundle), this is Motörhead as they were meant to be heard: dirty, distorted and driven straight into thousands of headbanging skulls. tinyurl.com/motor-tapes