Billy F Gibbons – Hardware
Universal / Concord Records – 2021
Rock, Blues, Surf, Desert
Rated: ****
Wow. Been fortunate enough to see ZZ Top quite a few times live and they’ve always managed to make it all look so damn easy. Looking cool and rocking hard. They’ve got their sound and they’ve got their style and it will never disappoint. But does it surprise? Perhaps not that often. But that’s where Billy Fucking Gibbons comes in! Sure, the first few tracks on the new Hardware album are all good or better yet, the best he ever recorded solo. And then there are even tracks that are better than those from the best ZZ Top period. Just check out More-More-More for instance. West Coast Junkie is the first track he wrote after Austin Hanks and Matt Sorum kidnapped him and took him out into the desert. No, not in the mafia kind of way! And West Coast Junkie has turned into this wild mixture of surf and desert, perfect for a Tarantino soundtrack and for every hot and steamy night out there, where the danger lurks. And where the dirt is just around the corner, as we can hear in his dirty ode to Spanish Fly. And sure, he’s been there before, in the desert you know, with Josh Homme at Rancho De La Luna. But this was a different studio, Escape Studio and a whole new ballgame. But his love for the desert, the mysteries and the danger are obvious and get that extra supernatural delightful treatment with this album and final track Desert High in particular. Since he was unsure of how to sing the lyrics, Matt suggested he’d read them out loud first to see how it would sound. If it really is the first take, as the man suggested, we hear on the record is best left a mystery, but somehow the desert, has made Billy Fucking Gibbons sound like Leonard Cohen, out there near Joshua Tree. The desert knows and the desert does wonders, just listen to the new Hardware album by 71-year old Billy Fucking Gibbons. Wow.
(Written by JK)