★★★★★
Rhino ZZ Top's core sound consists of Frank Beard's complex rhythms, Billy Gibbons' overdriven Delta boogie riffage and Dusty Hill's bass, locked in with Beard in motorik precision and with Gibbons in harmonic counterpoint. Their instrumental base rides below Gibbons' twanged Delta growl and the twin frontmen's gruff harmonies. The lyrics are raunchily honest on earnest yet satirical songs about sex and favorite inanimate objects...
- www.relix.com
2013-07-26
★★★★★
100 tracks from the first twenty years of "that Little ol' band from Texas" By Luke Torn... As high-minded concepts from low-aiming modern primitives go, ZZ Top, the blues-and-boogie trio that arose from the ashes of the Texas garage/psych scene at the dawn of the 1970s, are a wonder of nature, a genuine pop culture phenomenon...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2013-07-17
★★★★★
Always a bunch of snarky dudes, the first ZZ Top album in nine years has about as much to do with the titular future as Dusty and Billy's scraggly beards and their furry guitars. It may have taken Rick Rubin to shake the sequencers out of their systems but he and the threesome whittled these 10 blues rockers down from 20 CDs worth of snippets and jams- a process that took four years--to return the Texas trio to their gritty roots...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
How many of the folks who helped make ZZ Top MTV darlings and superstar arena-rockers back in the coke-saturated '80s are still interested in the band? Or the at the time teenagers who discovered the band early with a purchase of Rio Grande Mud or Tres Hombres in the mid-'70s...
- www.antimusic.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
It's 1985 and ZZ Top are the world biggest rock band. Well into their second decade, the Eliminator album is on its way towards shifting 10 million copies. Capitalising on the explosion of MTV (the videos for 'Legs' and 'Sharp Dressed Man' on perpetual rotation), the Texan trio find themselves propelled to unexpected superstar status. They headline that summer's Monsters of Rock festival...
- music.thedigitalfix.com
2012-09-13
★★★★★
Show Dog-Universal Covering ZZ Top takes balls. Their songs have a lot of soul and if one is lacking in that area, then it clearly shows. The trio crafted songs that sonically resonated beyond the visual imagery of their famous videos. Produced by ZZ Top, along with Carl Stubner, the 11-track work re-purposes that imagery with a cavalcade of voices, canvassing robust material as all-stars ( The M.O.B...
- www.relix.com
2011-12-26
★★★★★
Recorded live and (very) raw, this 1980 performance captures ZZ Top at the artistic pinnacle of their career -- just prior to their transformation from the hard-rocking, boogie woogie, blues-based "Little Ol' Band From Texas" into the slickly produced, synth-pop icons of the early MTV era...
- www.ink19.com
2011-08-05
★★★★★
Imagine what it was like to be ZZ Top in 1980, selling beards and old-school blues-rock to a world with a Mohawk attitude and punk ethic...
- www.austinchronicle.com
2011-07-04
★★★★★
ZZ Top's allure has always been a result of what the band doesn't reveal--like the long beards and shades that permanently hide their faces. Similarly, the best songs ZZ Top ever produced--"La Grange," "Tush" and "Gimme All Your Lovin'" among them--have hard riffs shot through with plenty of tension and mystery. Despite its 16 tracks of music, "Mescalero," the Texas trio's 15th studio release, hides nothing and holds little promise...
- www.soundspike.com
2010-12-07
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