MUSIC: Motorhead mows down the House of Blues
The theme for the evening: rocking out with one’s male appendage out.
The man who delivered the marching orders: a 62-year-old dude with a mustache whose thickness rivals the business end of a push broom.
Lemmy Kilmister is heavy metal incarnate, a big, swarthy, oversexed denim demon whose bass rumbles like stampeding livestock.
“Good evening, we are Motörhead,” he announced from the House of Blues stage on Thursday night. “We play rock and roll.”
With all due respect to Kilmister, “play” isn’t really the right word here — “strangle” is more like it.
“I’ve got the medicine you need,” Kilmister bellowed in his trademark whiskey-scorched rasp on a show opening “Dr. Rock.” “I’ve got the power, got the speed.”
Truer words were never spoken — or bellowed, as the case may be.
Still the most punishing power trio around after all these years, Motörhead tunes are a study in the benefits of having a low center of gravity: They’re bottom-heavy rippers that forsake finesse for a blunt force charge suggestive of a bunch of tanks rolling over some hapless village.
At the HOB, the band demonstrated just how consistent they’ve been since their mid-‘70s debut, as current-era tunes like “Rock Out,” from the band’s pummeling new disc “Motorizer,” and “In The Name of Tragedy” stood up well next to old-school fan favorites like “Stay Clean” and “Metropolis.” 
Per usual, Motörhead examined some of the crevices of its extensive back catalog, tearing through the seldom heard “I Got Mine” from the overlooked 1983 disc “Another Perfect Day” and airing rarities like “Over The Top.”
The band is known for their velocity and helping lay down the blueprint for thrash, speed metal and high octane punk, but there’s a steady rock and roll swing at the heart of much of the group’s material, and this was underscored when Motörhead delved into the dirty groove of tunes like “Just Cos’ You Got The Power,” a song that longhairs can dance to even outside of the mosh pit.
Making 90 minutes feel more like 60, the band thumbed its nose at time — kind of like Lemmy himself.
Speaking of hard rock institutions, Motörhead was preceded at the House of Blues by ghoul punk stalwarts the Misfits, who squeezed as many tunes into a 50-minute set as (in)humanly possible.
Few bands boast a repertoire as fat free as this bunch, as their hook-strewn hit parade is one of the cornerstones of pop punk.
This is exemplified by how many bands have covered their tunes — seriously, there are only a handful of groups who have ever had so many different acts take a stab at one or more of their songs.
Nowadays, the Misfits pretty much do the same thing themselves: Bassist Jerry Only is the last remnant of the band’s classic early lineups still in the group, which is rounded out by former Black Flag members Dez Cadena on guitars and Robo on drums.
And so it’s pretty much Misfits karaoke when the band plays, with lots of singalong help from the crowd on rapid-fire anti-anthems like “20 Eyes,” “Teenagers From Mars,” “Astro Zombies” and dozens of other genre classics.
The band blazed through the tunes, sometimes too much so: The current incarnation of the Misfits has a tendency to play their songs overly fast, blasting through them to such an extent that they sometimes lose the melodic swing that made them so great in the first place.
Thus, their set at HOB felt a little turgid at times, though they still had “Attitude” to spare.
And then there was heavy metal Hessians Valient Thorr, who came with blazing twin guitar leads and long and gnarly garden gnome beards.
With a frontman who looked like a cross between Teen Wolf and a heavy metal Zach Galifianakis, the band churned out fist-pounding man rock with bitchin’ titles like “I Hope the Ghost of the Dead Haunt Yr. Soul Forever.”
Before they took the stage, assorted clips from old “Godzilla” flicks played on the house monitors, and, true to form, the violence that poured from the speakers as these dudes played was a sufficient enough approximation of the rumble of giant warring lizards.
