During most of the Eighties, Billy Gibbons was trapped in an entertainment-industry twilight zone. ZZ Top's guitarist, vocalist and spiritual leader was living in two worlds: the blues-drenched landscape of his musical imagination and the alternate universe of his group's mass pop appeal – an appeal created in large part by his diabolic genius for irresistible videos. Gibbons sold the boogie like nobody since John Lee Hooker, but when he transformed ZZ Top from a sound into a loony cartoon, he froze his music's original roots and began searching for an aural equivalent to the brave new world of video in the electronic world of samples and delays. The result was a highly successful soundtrack
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to the hit visuals that accompanied the albums
Eliminator, from 1983, and
Afterburner, which came two years later, but a decided move away from the smoking asphalt longtime fans of the band had come to love and expect.
In the five years since Afterburner, most of the band's early work – ZZ Top's First Album (1970), Rio Grande Mud (1972), Tres Hombres (1973), Fandango! (1975), Deguello (1979) and El Loco (1981) – has been reissued in digitally remastered form on Six Pack, a monster set that showcases the Texas trio's most awesome recorded sounds in crisp, powerful terms. Recycler is a fitting follow-up to the reissue project. It's a flat-out guitar extravaganza, with Gibbons – ably assisted by his longtime sidekicks, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard – unleashing the kind of nasty, ripping sounds that once made his band a formidable Lone Star cross between Cream and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Recycler is a technical tour de force, but it is not a synthesizer record, as were its two most recent predecessors. The album is really constructed around the extraordinary variety of guitar textures Gibbons has literally at his fingertips. "Decision or Collision" is vintage Gibbons, a pounding rocker designed merely to provide the setting for a series of hellish guitar excursions; in terms of the composition and phrasing of his solos and the song's burnished sheen, this is as good as Gibbons has ever sounded. More squalling guitar signals the beginning of "Give It Up," a raucous catalog of surreal Gibbons boasts along the lines of "I trained Trigger singlehandedly"; the sonic tricks are still working overtime, too, as Gibbons coaxes a string of motorcycle sounds from his guitar. Not since "Tube Snake Boogie," off the classic album El Loco, has Gibbons drawn the connection between sex and food as eloquently as he does on "Burger Man," which comes complete with Hendrix-style rhythm slabs.
"Love Thing" drives off a long, hot solo to the fade-out; "Penthouse Eyes" is a funk strut structured around two magnificently arranged guitar solos; and "Tell It" sounds like a tribute to James Gangera Joe Walsh. Gibbons's mood turns r
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