ZZ Top Turns Back the Clock at Pond

ZZ Top sure picked a funny time to play it safe. The venerable Texas trio is on tour again with a new album, “XXX,” 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 high points of their 80-minute show, guitarist Billy Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard drew only one song from “XXX”: 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. On nearly every front, it demonstrated why it hasn’t just survived for three decades but flourished.

Everything ZZ Top does begins with songs unshakably grounded in the blues. Time after time, they went on to prove that the form remains infinitely malleable, from the upbeat boogie of “Tush” to the slow churn of “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” from the pulsating rock of “Pincushion” to the percolating punch of “Got Me Under Pressure.”

Add a clean set with white fabric geometric shapes that make the stage look a bit like the Sydney Opera House, some perfectly timed, effortlessly executed choreography from Gibbons and Hill and you’ve got the secret for warding off momentum-draining predictability that would torpedo a less-attentive group.

By comparison, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s preceding set seemed even flabbier than it might have had the band been on its own, as it was less than three months ago playing the nearby 1,200-seat Sun Theatre. Where the ZZ boys make the effort on “XXX” to push their proven formula, Skynyrd’s new “Edge of Forever” is content to rehash theirs.

ZZ Top’s musical minimalism contrasted with Skynyrd’s more-is-better philosophy. Singer Johnny Van Zant was flanked by four guitarists, including bassist Leon Wilkeson, and backed by two female singers, a keyboardist and a drummer, who communicated best when their music hewed closest to basic blues structures. The rhythmic and melodic twists the group adds to its grinding Southern rock tunes sound that way--added on instead of organically grown.

The reconstituted Skynyrd has been touring and recording for a dozen years--longer than the original band that lost original lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and two other members in a 1977 plane crash. Expect them to continue right up to the edge of forever.