La Futura - ZZ Top

 

Provenance: By the time I wound up getting this album I was already a hardcore ZZ Top fan. Big into the albums and a few years away from being thoroughly disappointed by a lacklustre live performance at Wembley Arena.

(The Wembley gig, which I attended with my friend Sandy, sucked. The Arena a bit of a pain to get to on public transport, isn't it? Once there, I went through a screening process more rigorous than at most international airports and then spent £14 on two beers.

Jimmy Barnes from Cold Chisel was the support act, and although his ragged bellowing was fun for a while, he failed to do 'Seven Days', his best solo track. ZZ Top were worse; Billy Gibbons can move about but can't sing, whilst Dusty Hill can sing but can barely move.

After little over an hour, including covers of 'Sixteen Tons' and 'Jailhouse Rock' - a song that nobody ever needs to cover, ever again - the Top shuffled off stage and the lights came on. Sandy hoped that the second half would be better, but it was clear to me that they'd stuck a fork in it. Sixty-five, seventy minutes at a push? Eye-watering ticket prices and untold hassle? Cheers guys. Frustrated, we headed to the much-missed Big Red bar, saw a cracking metal act for free, and were able to get a pint under a fiver.)

Review: I don't know what everybody else was expecting from ZZ Top in 2012 but kicking off La Futura with a cover of a 1989 Houston hip-hop track possibly wasn't one of them. Yet ZZ Top have never been afraid to go off-piste, from individual oddities such as 'Manic Mechanic' from Deguello right the way through to fusing synthesizers and drum machines with southern boogie, practically inventing their own genre with Eliminator. So repurposing DJ DMD and the Inner Soul Clique's '25 Lighters' into 'I Gotsa Get Paid' - a nice nod to 'Just Got Paid', no? - shouldn't really set any eyebrows heading north. 

In fact, if one wasn't aware of its background, you'd just think it was another great raging slab of ZZ Top's smoke 'n' chrome hard rock that's been their hallmark since Rhythmeen. Crucially, both 'I Gotsa Get Paid' and the chugging blueser 'Chartreuse', tracks uno y dos, are simply better than anything from previous album Mescalero; an album that had its charms, not least the preponderance of Spanglish in the lyrics, but was ultimately too sprawling, flabby and unfocused for its own good.

Here, though, ZZ Top have enlisted Rick Rubin, which means two things - no excess, and a back-to-basics sound. So, aside from a few guitar overdubs, what one hears on La Futura is the basic rock combo formula of guitar, bass, drums and voice. There's the odd extra flourish here and there - the rather ponderous ballad 'Over You' fleshes out its sound with a much needed keyboard, for example - but insofar as these elements are used sparingly, it's a strikingly similar setup to that of ZZ Top's best album, Tres Hombres.

Accommodations have been made for time passed, however. Billy Gibbons, one of the more instantly recognisable guitarists out there, plays with gusto in that choppy, greasy style that makes ZZ Top records so goddamn fun, but he's quite obviously close-mic'd to allow for deficiencies in the voice department. But it's good! In fact, the additional sandpaper to a voice already coloured with road rash makes everything sound ten percent meaner and sleazier than would otherwise be the case. Sticking with performances, my only real bugbear is that Frank Beard still demonstrates some tasty stick work but it's nowhere near as creative as the rhythms he was banging out before Eliminator. Go back and give those old platters a spin and you'll hear some chewy, fiddly drum figures. Beard was (is?) a superb drummer with a great pocket feel. On La Futura the latter is in evidence, but it lacks finesse.

(I remember playing 'Just Got Paid' with my former band, and easily the most taxing aspect of recreating the feel of the original was getting the drum pattern right. Fortunately, that's nothing to do with me, guv!)

If one or two numbers can be a bit samey - just how many times can you chop and change the blues? - it's alright, there's enough variety elsewhere to maintain interest, and at a hair under forty minutes La Futura is well-paced. I was surprised a couple of times - 'Flying' High' had an almost power-pop feel to it, and the best track was a little unexpected. I've often been underwhelmed when ZZ Top slow things down, yet the molasses-crawl of 'It's Too Easy Manana' possesses an authoritative, anthemic quality and one of the more characterful vocal deliveries on the joint. Mescalero was rotten with these songs, which, when coupled with its hour plus run time, dragged the thing into a swamp. Here, the two strollers act as welcome interludes.

All things said and done, La Futura isn't going to cause ships to capsize, but it's a very good addition to the ZZ Top canon. Stripping back their sound exposes the dirty innards of the engine, and they sound all the better for doing so; I don't think there's a skeevier intro around than the sound of Gibbons' guitar revving up on 'I Don't Wanna Lose, Lose You'. A triumph, then - and certainly more rewarding than the live experience. 

Recycler - ZZ Top

Provenance: When I was in my teens my mum worked in a local library. Every now and again she would bring home a cassette tape that had been removed from the collections because they had some minor damage (but were otherwise listenable). One such tape was ZZ Top's 1990 album Recycler, and if I recall correctly there was a second or two worth of 'Burger Man' that had been chewed up. I found this tolerable.

Review: This is a peculiar one, because I find Recycler - as a collection of music - to be a mildly entertaining rock album. However, in a wider context, this could be the madeleine cake of my mid-teen years - a time where I played football everyday, played computer games with friends whilst sat on inflatable chairs and dreamed of one day being able to play '20th Century Boy' on guitar. Recycler may be a strange avatar for a very happy time of my life, but it's impossible to divorce the music from the moment, so attempting anything like a fair-handed stab at a review is unlikely.

A constant and welcome part of my life at the time was my pal Chris, who lived down the road from me. We walked home from school together, played in the same Sunday league side, and would watch WWF wrestling - followed by VH1's rock show - round his place on a Friday night. I'm dragging Chris into discussion of this album, because at the time he was probably the world's biggest Metallica fan, a band I can't help but think of when considering where ZZ Top were in their career when Recycler was released.

Firstly, ZZ Top and Metallica both enjoyed early acclaim with distinctive genre albums - Tres Hombres and Deguello for the former, Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets for the latter. Both then made a big play for commercial success with idiosyncratic and innovative-sounding albums that alienated the hardcore but scored big on sales - Eliminator for the Top, Metallica for, well, take a guess. On that basis, in terms of popularity and career trajectory, Recycler is ZZ Top's Reload. Even the names are faint echoes of each other. But is that fair?

On the one hand, Reload doesn't contain anything like one of my top five Metallica songs, but I'm an absolute sucker for Recycler's lead-off, 'Concrete And Steel'. As a statement of intent, it's a doozy - slabs of guitar, throbbing bass and a fat, chunky sound, the aural equivalent of a coal-rolling monster truck. And it's not that 'Lovething', the next song, is too bad either, probably because its electro-chug hasn't quite worn out its welcome. Unfortunately, that can't be said for succeeding tracks, with ZZ Top wedded to the sequencer to such an extent that you're dying for some kind of rhythmic variation. It's a straight four to the floor, mostly mid-paced (yes, they speed it up! And slow it down!) and devoid of any frills or, indeed, fills. I'm not expecting a polka or what-have-you, but would it have killed them to have done something in shuffle time?

The overall effect is that Recycler becomes a bit of a trudge. With such little variation in either conception or execution, I find that an album central to my formative years is inescapably, and regrettably, a bit boring. Yet I played the shit out of this.

There are tantalising glimpses of an album that is much better than the Recycler that saw the light of day. 'My Head's In Mississippi' is a nasty boogie pitched somewhere between George Thorogood's 'Bad To The Bone' and ZZ Top's own 'Tush', but lacks both the dirt and vitality that drive those two - superior - precursors. 'Burger Man' bounces along nicely enough but is full of lazy, crap innuendoes neither inventive or weird enough by ZZ Top's standards to pass muster. '2000 Blues' sounds like another run at the formula that worked on Eliminator's 'I Need You Tonight'. Again, whereas the earlier track was a slow-burn, neon-flecked ode replete with sadness and regret, '2000 Blues' is just a slow song featuring some Miami Vice blues-bends.

At least the album finishes on a high - we're at 'Doubleback', and it sounds like the guys have snapped out of a collective bout of somnambulism. It's the cousin to 'Concrete And Steel', and has a real humdinger of a chorus, even if it doesn't quite carry the same heft. However, common with all the tracks on Recycler, is that there's not a single memorable Billy Gibbons guitar solo. Gibbons is one of my favourite stylists on the six-string and, especially during the 1970s, would squeeze out some of the smuttiest, sleaziest sounding lead breaks. He had the best guitar tone, too. The best. Here, it's dulled, processed, covered up with whizzbangs and altogether too mannered for it's own good. This element of the music alone stands as an avatar for my wider impressions, which is that Recycler represents both a missed opportunity and an inability to exploit what made ZZ Top so damn listenable in the first place.

Still a hundred times better than Reload though.