ZZ Top’s Spin on the Blues Keeps Aging Band Relevant

ZZ Top sure picked a funny time to play it safe. The venerable Texas trio is on tour again with a new album that accomplishes in the late ‘90s the same seemingly impossible hat trick that “Eliminator” did in the synth-laden early ‘80s: making these blues brothers relevant one more time.

But Saturday at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim, for all the highlights of their 80-minute show, guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard drew just one song from the new “XXX” album--the conventionally chugging “Fearless Boogie”--instead of the more adventurous rap-metal album opener “Poke Chop Sandwich” or the sonically experimental, hip-hop-laced “Crucifixx-A-Flatt.”

Yet even with its gaze turned largely to the past, the Little Ol’ Band From Texas needed no apologies. They demonstrated why they’ve not just survived for three decades, but flourished. It all starts with songs grounded in the blues, then proves that the form remains infinitely malleable.

The cleanly constructed set and the periodic choreography executed so effortlessly by Gibbons and Hill--looking like sharp yet seedy Santa siblings--accented the music just enough to ward off any momentum-draining predictability.

By comparison, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s set Saturday seemed even flabbier than it might have had the band been on its own, as it was recently the Sun Theatre. Where the ZZ boys use “XXX” to push their proven formula, Skynyrd’s new “Edge of Forever” album and tour is content to rehash theirs.