(4 stars)
Recycler
ZZ Top
Warner Bros.

ZZ Top Recycles the Blues
By John Swenson

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 anddelays.  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 a 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 hisfingertips.  "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 isas 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 solor 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
Gang-era 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."
	Thesong thattells 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 inthe videos, and the listener is left to puzzle out
the words -- and play the damn thing over again.

(From Rolling Stone 11/29/90 p.103)