POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Decibel Made Them Do It : Motorhead Crests the Waves of Pain, and Its Lead Singer Gargles With Molten Lead

Motorhead is a band so loud and abrasive that just to warm up for its Coach House show Monday night I went to hear Bob Dornan speak that afternoon. But even Orange County’s lone haranguer isn’t in the same class as Lemmy, the British group’s lead singer and bassist, who doesn’t so much sing as seem to be gargling molten lead.

That impression is enhanced by Lemmy’s singing technique: His microphone points down from above his head, and he tilts his head back to sing into it, as one might to gargle, or bay at the moon, for that matter.

Like many critics, I don’t have too much use for metal music as a rule, largely because the music has too many rules. While the bands universally assume a nonconformist stance, the music and staging in most cases is as calculated and structured as the Nuremberg Rally.

But Motorhead, not unlike its Australian brethren AC/DC, revels in those conventions to a cartoonish degree, surmounting them in the process. They are all the leathery swagger and excess bluster the style can contain, and then somewhat more, rising to a mythic level. As the soundman’s instruction on one of Motorhead’s pieces of equipment declares: Everything louder than everything else!

Lemmy’s vocal tool is such a thick, palpable thing that it would be fascinating to hear it in an unplugged, acoustic setting--far from the case at the Coach House, where the band hauled in its own arena-grade sound system with two huge walls of speakers and 18,000 watts of power pumping them, not counting the 13,000-watt monitor system facing the band and the heaped stacks of Marshall amps onstage.

There was a decibel meter by the mixing board at the back of the room, and it bounced between 120 and 123 decibels throughout the performance. To get some sense of proportion here, zero decibels is the threshold of human hearing, 120 is the threshold of pain, and a three-decibel increase equals a doubling of sound intensity. In industrial situations, a consistent exposure to a mere 80 decibels is considered to pose a risk of permanent deafness.

This writer learned on this occasion that it’s possible to stuff in two pairs of ear plugs if you really try, and finally took to cowering behind one of the speaker walls, each roughly the size of a condominium. Next time I’ll just try encasing my head in Styrofoam beforehand.

While not worth the years of hearing I might miss as a result, Motorhead does put on an awfully engaging show. Despite his reputation for wearing his band mates down to charred husks after a tour or two, Lemmy has managed to keep the guitar duo of Wurzel and Phil (Zoom) Campbell in working order for the last eight years. Except for their extraneous guitar solo exchanges leading into the Ted Nugent oldie “Cat Scratch Fever,” they played with a clanging rambunctiousness well-suited to Lemmy’s vocal ministrations.

The group’s newest member, drummer Mikkey Dee, kept his double-bass set thumping at a manic pace, though he doesn’t have quite the stamina of former stickman Philthy Animal Taylor. The racket was abetted by an offstage roadie playing organ bass pedals and keyboards.

When it comes down to it, though, Motorhead is Lemmy. His thrashing bass playing sounds like a band in itself, or at least a busy factory. His singing is so severe that it’s hard to imagine he still has a throat. And unlike those of most apocalyptic rock poets, Lemmy’s lyrics express a brand of cheerful nihilism.

“The only time when I’m easy is when I’m killed by death,” he sang during the group’s immortal “Killed by Death.” He may be doomed, life may be hopeless, but in the meantime--like Elvis but ugly--he’s got a lot of livin’ to do.

Some of his songs have a more definite point, such as “Bad Religion” from the current “March or Die” album, in which he rails at “evangelistic Nazis”:

I spit in the eye of Satan,

And I will spit in thine .

The devils that surround thee,

Live only in thine eye.

Of course, you can make the words out only on the CD. Live, it just sounds like a tortuous digital code, which reads like this: “pain pain pain, slightly less pain, pain pain, slightly less pain, pain pain. . . .”

In the middle of the performance the power blew out. The group’s sound system was drawing so much wattage it’s surprising San Onofre didn’t experience a melt-down. After a 15-minute pause, things were up and running again.

Some other songs in the show were “I’m So Bad (Baby I Don’t Care),” “Metropolis,” “Hellraiser,” and “Just ‘Coz You Got the Power.” Motorhead encored with its anthem “Ace of Spades,” which had many in the audience up and slam-dancing.

Ever the gentleman, Lemmy’s parting words were: “Thank you, California. Always a pleasure. We’ll be back soon to ---- up your ears some more.”

The opening band, Slamhound, had a lead singer, Joshua Todd, who has “chaos” tattooed on his abdomen. Other than that, there wasn’t much to distinguish the quartet from the hundreds of other post-Guns N’ Roses Los Angeles bands and their conformist rage.