Category: 2021 Album Drops

Opening number The Beach is a slow build track. It begins with a strong pulse composed of a steady drum beat and guitar, with lead singer Ellie Rowsell’s gentle upper register inviting you into the world of Blue Weekend. From here, the track builds with more shoegaze style layers until it transcends into a frantic dreamlike state until it stops suddenly, leaving you bleary eyed and asking for more. And more Blue Weekend gives. It’s a stunning opener to an incredible album.

Wolf Alice first sprang onto the scene with their Creature Songs EP, with their breakout track Moaning Lisa Smile. The subject matter of that song is unconventional, a track written from the perspective of Lisa Simpson of The Simpsons. It’s a cleverly written song and showed a keen aptitude for great melodies coupled with interesting lyrics. The potential was even more on show on 2015’s My Love Is Cool, a kaleidoscopic album filled with ideas that give the album a kind of jukebox feel. This potential was realised on Visions of a Life, the Mercury Award winning album which spawned international hit Don’t Delete the Kisses. There was speculation as to where they could go from such a good album.

Blue Weekend takes that speculation and promptly sets it alight. The album is a true classic in every sense of the word, an act of fulfilling potential so well to the extent that it seems impossible for them to do anything wrong. Everyone on this album sounds like they’re having the time of their life, playing to the very top level. The rhythm section is the adrenaline pouring through the heavier tracks, and the heartbeat to the emotional numbers. Rowsell’s vocals keep getting better, moving from heavenly upper-register notes like in Safe from Heartbreak (if you never fall in love) to roaring like a woman possessed on Play the Greatest Hits. And Joff Oddie adds another level to each song, providing catchy, addictive licks that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand to see what that glorious noise is.

This is their most consistent album to date. All of the tracks keep the shoegaze dreamlike tendencies that instantly transport you into the setting they have created. The album cover perfectly advertises the contents of the record. Lipstick on the Glass has the most accomplished chorus of their career, emotional, intense and instantly memorable. The second most accomplished chorus of their career is a grand total of three tracks later on the fourth single from the album How Can I Make it OK?, a very rare type of track offering itself to you like a warm blanket after heartbreak.

It wouldn’t be a Wolf Alice album without some true heavy rockers. My Love Is Cool had the creep-blasting You’re a Germ, Visions of a Life had the vicious Yuk Foo and Blue Weekend has two in its 40 minute runtime. Smile is the second single, and includes the most furious guitar line you have heard. It’s the kind that will make your morning commute feel like the 3.7 mile long straight in the Le Mans 24 hour race. It’s exhilarating. Play the Greatest Hits somehow becomes even more vicious. It starts by letting you like it’s just heaviness with no melody. At halfway through however, it’s small but significant melody appears, giving a boost to the rest of the song.

And even though all the songs on the album are fantastic, special recognition has to be given to the emotional zeitgeist of The Last Man of Earth. It should be a crime to write a song that can consistently give you goosebumps, that can give you a huge emotional reaction each time, that can impress you this much. It’s easy to pick apart a song and mention which parts are good and give you that feeling, but to do that to this song would be bordering on sacrilege. (Bonus: listen to this performance of the song that was done on UK show Later… with Jools Holland and try not to be moved).

There are albums you recommend, and there are albums that you recommend. This one is the latter. If you have had any interest in Wolf Alice, you must listen to this album. Then show your family. Then show your friends. Music this good deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. Wolf Alice have created a masterclass in their own kind of music on Blue Weekend, and who are we to ask for anything more.

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If, at any point during the recent crisis, you found yourself thinking, ‘What would Billy Gibbons do?’ – and there are probably worse role models – you might have pictured the ZZ Top frontman lighting out for some cactus-pocked desert redoubt in one of his garageful of hot rods. A scarlet coupe, perhaps, flames painted along the bonnet, packed with some of Gibbons’ legendarily vast guitar collection, and sufficient provisions to ride out lockdown.

Breaking News: ZZ Top Bassist Dusty Hill, 72, has died

Read our post about the long-time, iconic bassist, Dusty Hill.

You wouldn’t have been too far wrong. Hardware was recorded in the rocky mesas of California’s Mojave, Gibbons teaming up with drummer Matt Sorum (Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, The Cult) and guitarist Austin Hanks; Rebecca and Megan Lovell of Larkin Poe contribute backing vocals. The single West Coast Junkie (“I’m a West Coast junkie from a Texas town/And when I get to Cali it’s going down”) serves, in this context, as a Southern surf-rock mission statement, Gibbons channelling Dick Dale over a pulsing go-go beat, the drums quoting The Surfari’s Wipeout before the guitar solo.

Gibbons’ two previous solo albums have been obvious departures from ZZ Top. 2015’s Perfectamundo was a joyous excursion into Latin-rhythmed rock, and 2018’s Big Bad Blues was what its title said it was. But Hardware, whether part of some planned cycle or not, is Gibbons going back to where he came in: were it presented to a focus group of ardent ZZ Top fans as a new ZZ Top album, it would be surprising if anyone spotted the imposture.

Certainly, there is little chance of mistaking Billy Gibbons’ guitar: that smooth swagger along the frontier between the blues and Southern rock (the latter genre being one that Gibbons can claim to have helped invent). The first notes on Hardware are the opening riff of My Lucky Card, a characteristic Gibbons motif: an insistent guitar fusillade with which you can hear him placating some rumbustious early 1970s Texas honky-tonk as the empties start hitting the chicken wire.

There are, thereafter, few subtleties. Musically, Hardware is substantially comprised of barely reconstructed boogie. Lyrically, it is almost exclusively concerned with women, whiskey, cars, highways and so forth. Given, however, that this a palette Gibbons did more to define than most, and still draws from more deftly than many, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, still less so given that Gibbons’ 72-year-old fingers have lost none of their way around a fretboard. So while Shuffle, Step & Slide, for example, sounds exactly how a song called Shuffle, Step & Slide by Billy Gibbons might be expected to sound, its glorious solos are another entry in Gibbons’ hefty catalogue of elegant illustrations of the overlap between blues and Southern rock.

The ZZ Top period that Hardware most recalls is the one spanning 1981’s El Loco, 1983’s umpty-selling Eliminator and 1985’s Afterburner, as the group added synthesisers and sequencers to their primal rock trio setup. While Hardware doesn’t venture nearly as far into full-fledged Southern rock disco as some of the aforementioned, there are many instinctive or deliberate tips of the ten-gallon to this period – Larkin Poe’s glossy backing vocals on Stackin’ Bones, the turbocharged production of S-G-L-M-B-B-R, the distorted lead vocal on More-More-More, also punctuated with a growled Yeaaaahhh, which sounds copy/pasted from Sharp Dressed Man.

There are one or two more obviously outré moments, of the kind Gibbons might not have felt able to indulge under the ZZ Top marque. Vagabond Man is a sweet electric piano-drenched ballad, like Steve Miller fronting Drive-By Truckers. Spanish Fly is a gruff rap over clattering percussion and sparse, squealing guitar. Closer Desert High is more minimalist still, a sombre spoken-word narration of the view across the Mojave and what it conjures, in this instance the spectres of Jim Morrison and Gram Parsons.

Overall, the songs on Hardware fly in direct proportion to the degree to which they can be imagined being played on a fur-trimmed guitar mounted on a spindle. I Was A Highway is one such, underpinning the unsubtle metaphor (“You’d think I was a highway/The way she hit the road”) with a climactic post-guitar solo gear change from effortless cruise control to foot-down roar towards the horizon. She’s On Fire is another, a glorious headlong tear-up which could have graced any ZZ Top album of this last half-century or so. For all Gibbons’ often intriguing meandering from his usual path, on Hardware and elsewhere in his solo career, there remains little doubt about what he does best.

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