Recycler : ZZ Top : Review : Rolling Stone

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 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 relatively serious on "2000 Blues," a stately, straightforward slow blues. In the song, Gibbons explores the condition of his celebrity and the emptiness of corporate pop; it's a rare introspective moment for a songwriter who is typically drawn more to playfulness and crazy fun, who rarely allows listeners a glimpse behind the mask. And despite the decision to get back to the blues-rock roots, there are a number of impressive engineering feats on Recycler, not least of which is the textured percussion layered into "Concrete and Steel."

The song that tells the whole story, though, is "My Head's in Mississippi," an obvious statement of purpose from the band that has crusaded to keep the memory of blues legend Muddy Waters alive. Once again, it's Hooker's boogie that drives the song along. "I'm shuffling through the Texas sand, but my head's in Mississippi," croaks Gibbons. At this point, he really hits the fractured storytelling groove that has graced his greatest work. Before he's through, he finds himself "stumbling through the parking lot of an invisible 7-11," then watches a naked cowgirl float across the ceiling. "She was mumblin' to some Howlin' Wolf," explains Gibbons, "about some voodoo healin'." Then, after another great solo, Gibbons and his partners are gone, disappeared as in the videos, and the listener is left to puzzle out the words – and play the damn thing over again.