Billy F Gibbons
Hardware CONCORD
ZZ Top leader’s dirty third album. He’s getting the hang of this solo lark.
Frankly, the age of 66 is rather late in the day for a multimillion-selling rock star to launch a solo career, but that’s what ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons did in 2015 with the Latin-tinged Perfectamundo. Three years later, the aptly titled The Big Bad Blues was half covers. With ZZ Top on recording hiatus since 2012’s La Futura, perhaps Gibbons is simply bored, because here comes album number three. And he’s shifted the ground again.
Recorded in the Californian desert with former Guns N’ Roses/Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum, one-time Slick Lilly leader Austin Hanks and, on the whip-smart , Larkin Poe, is a riff-strewn feast of scuzz. Gibbons is back to songwriting too, having a hand in everything bar Bob Dylan collaborator Augie Meyers’s , which he transforms into a cousin of Dire Straits’s . The desert looms large, and not just in some of the Queens Of The Stone Age-style guitar, or , where you can almost feel the sand in your throat: it’s everywhere,
