Music Review - ZZ Top: La Futura

            ZZ Top doesn’t need to make any more new music.  They just don’t.  It’s like KISS or Ozzy Osbourne or Led Zeppelin (if that was even an option).  There is a certain point where, as a band, you have built up enough credit with the fans that you are able to just tour every year, or every two years, and play your “greatest hits”.  Besides, it’s not like any of the abovementioned bands would have room in their set for a few new songs anyway. 

They don’t have to, but that doesn’t mean that new music isn’t well received and appreciated, if it is in fact a good disc.  Luckily, La Futura, ZZ Top’s newest release is just that; a solid collection of songs from a group of guys that have the “Bass, Drums and Fuzzy Guitars” thing down to a science.  Listening to the ZZ Top catalogue, you can’t help but break their discography into three separate, but equally influential parts.  The first part was the boys finding themselves and their musical identity; blending southern rock and the blues together in a way that still sounds as good today as it did upwards of forty years ago.  The second, much shorter time period was the electronic age in the 80s.  This era included albums like Recycler, Eliminator and Afterburner.  After that, ZZ Top had another identity change.  They went back to their roots, but utilized the new technology of the day to make the sound heavier, dirtier and crunchier.  This is the phase they have stayed in, much to my enjoyment, since the early to mid 90s.  They took what they did in the beginning part of their career and just turned it up louder, and the fact that this sound and phase has stuck around the longest is a testament to the accessibility of it.

La Futura follows the path of the previous few albums to a “T”.  It combines heavy bluesy guitars with Billy Gibbons’ signature growl on vocals.  There are no real low points, as even the slower moments are well executed.  Hell, even the songs that feature a good deal of Dusty Baker (not really my personal favorite in other ZZ Top albums) are more than tolerable.  There are ten songs, and none of them are that long, so it leads to a fairly short album which is slightly disappointing (especially after the length of their last studio release Mescalaro), but it feels well-paced and the band retains its tight, professional nature throughout for the most part.

 The only issue is that there are certain songs: “Heartache in Blue” and “Have a Little Mercy” that seem unfinished.  They are two of the stronger songs until their respective ends when they either cut off or just turn into a sonic mess.  While wrapping these songs up nicely would have been ideal, and would have turned a good album into a great one, in no way does it take away from the rest of the album in terms of quality.

If you like ZZ Top, or just good rock music in general, La Futura is definitely an album you should check out.