Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
hot hot hot, 7 Jun 2006
I absolutely agree with the review below, this is the essential ZZ Top album, yet it was always only available on CD with absolutely dreadful '80s mastering. This version sounds fantastic - back to the gorgeous natural warmth of the vinyl version. Buy it now and destroy your other CD copy.
But those live bonus tracks, they are terrible. Very cruddy. Why oh why do remastered CDs always seem to have to include a bunch of terrible live bonus tracks that no-one wants and which, as the reviewer below says, just leave a nasty taste at the end of a classic album. I was going to knock off a star for this but just couldn't bring myself to, Tres Hombres is too good for 4 stars!
Now, please remaster the other early albums which received the same '80s hatchet job..
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tres Hobres, Cinco Estrellas, 8 Jun 2007
A great place to start the remastered series of ZZ Top albums. The first time ZZ Tops albums came out on cd someone hammered the life out of them by adding really dodgy effects to the drum sound. Not so this time. The albums sound like they were recorded last week and have surpassed the original vinyl. The rhythm section are in stunning, nay telepathic, form on this outing.
The extra tracks are a mixed blessing. I reckon they ought to have been put onto an album of their own along with the live tracks from Fandango. They were recorded, if memory serves correctly, in the Capital Theatre, Passiac, New Jersey 1980. I have heard a couple of different bootlegs of this show and these do not sound as good on bootleg as they do here.
Overall a must buy album for lovers of good rockin' music.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
scorchio, 3 Dec 2006
This 1973 classic was where ZZ Top hit the big time, at least in the USA and especially in their native Texas. Unquestionably their finest album so far, they only really equalled it with Eliminator a decade later. Suffice to say that it contains two of their very greatest tracks in the scorching boogie of La Grange and the awesome blues-rock of Jesus Just Left Chicago, plus several more excellent tunes that beat anything on most of their later albums, including the gospel-fired Have You Heard, quality rockers Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers and Move Me On Down The Line and the opening Waiting For The Bus. Even the filler is pretty good and you unfortunately can't say that about most ZZ Top albums. The whole album is full of some of the best blues-rock guitar-playing you'll ever hear, from the widely underrated Billy Gibbons, and the rhythm section of Dusty Hill and Frank Beard is by turns rocking, funky or just rock solid - shame so many people can't see past the beards.
Now as detailed in some of the other reviews, this remaster has restored (and improved upon) the original sound of the 1973 lp, without the horrible artificial reverb added to the drums on previous cd editions. It sounds great.
Then on top of that, you get previously unissued live versions of three of the songs on the album: Waiting For The Bus, Jesus Just Left Chicago and La Grange. The first two of these, if anything, improve on the studio versions, with a lowdown Waiting For The Bus seguing into a superbly grungy take on Jesus Just Left Chicago, while La Grange rocks convincingly despite being a little on the loose side in places. While the recordings are not absolutely state of the art, given the unfortunate dearth of officially available live recordings of ZZ Top and the high quality of the performances here, carping about the (actually pretty decent) recording quality seems pointless - we want more of this stuff, not less, but what we've got here will do very nicely for the moment. But it's a shame they couldn't find any contemporary live recordings - these appear to be from around 1979-80, although you won't find that out from the CD booklet which gives no details at all of their provenance.
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