Artist: Billy F Gibbons
Album: Big Bad Blues
Label: Snakefire Records
Release Date: 9.21.2018
Billy Gibbons is a guy needing no introduction to most. As frontman and guitarist with legendary rockers ZZ Top, he has successfully hammered out a place in the musical hearts of many blues-rock fans globally. Always covered and partly hidden behind his trademark facial hair, and Afro headband, Gibbons has a fiery, explosive approach to guitar, always blasting and bursting with zinging fretwork and a remarkably keen sense of power and purpose. In many ways, when Billy Gibbons plays and sings, I listen, though often curious about just quite what might be on the brink of discovery or delivery.
Here, with Big Bad Blues, Gibbons reaches deep into his own personal background, a dredging that finds him turning his hand to some old classic blues standards like Muddy Water’s “Rollin’ and Tumbling” and “Standing Around Crying,” as part of an eleven-track offering that unsurprisingly ripples with Gibbons’ riffs, licks and distinctive roil. Since ZZ Top first came on the scene back in 1969, Gibbons has been their near-totemic frontman, a center-stager who clearly and evidently enjoys his position and works his nuts off pushing out pulsing blues-rock that invariably echoes his own personal love of classic rock ’n’roll and blues. With Big Bad Blues, Gibbons has delivered his second solo effort in recent years and shown his maturity and understanding of what makes for a damn good sound.
This is an album that may surprise some of Gibbons’ followers, with, at times, a sensitivity seldom heard on ZZ Top’s hi-energy scale. But with this guy’s pedigree, we can hardly be surprised when he turns out a truly inspired and inspiring release that is bound to be a huge international success.
—Iain Patience
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