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Riding on a skittering synth lick not far removed from Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry, TV Dinners embraces the plastic-fantastic kookiness of 80s pop, from the goofy lyrics (’ I like the enchiladas and the teriyaki too, I even like the chicken if the sauce is not too blue’) to the charmingly weird b-movie homage music video that accompanied it. The runt of the four mega-hits from this album, TV Dinners is the most new-wave-y of the singles. Effortlessly groovy, hook-heavy, riding on a riff that sounds like chopper blades cutting through the smoke in some fiery jungle, Dirty Dog is one of the most fun and satisfying songs on the album, and still sounds a couple years ahead of its time.

On any other album, it would’ve been a smash, but it just had too much competition here. 5) Dirty Dogīuried deep on side two, Dirty Dog is the shoulda-been hit of the bunch. While it lacks the monster hooks of the album’s big hits, it is the perfect synthesis of ZZ Top’s searing blooze power and their obvious affection of 80’s new-wave pop. Propulsive and hard-hitting, it’s ready-made for an aggressive bout of pogo-dancing. Perhaps the dance-iest track on the record, I Got the Six is a quick little trifle that zips in and out in under three-minutes.

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No one’s gonna turn Flag off, but it’s probably not anybody’s favourite, either. It’s all there, but there’s nothing special about it. Like most of the album, it’s got ‘The People’s Tempo’ (120 bpm, incidentally), the slithery synthesized guitar sounds, the cardboard drums, and the girls-and-cars-are-interchangeable lyrics. The problem – and it’s a very slight one, granted – is that Flag is a little too formulaic for its own good. If the formula works, what’s bad about it? Coca-Cola and AC/DC are both formula-driven products, and everybody’s fine with ‘em. It is not an insult to call Eliminator formulaic.

Bad Girl is basically middle-of-the-road boogie-rock, a sort of throwback to repetitive 60s frat-party slop like Wooly Bully or Louie Louie. If you never made it this far on Eliminator, don’t worry, you didn’t miss much. It’s also the last song on the album, and this was still back in the days when placement on the record really meant something.

Bad Girl starts with crowd noises, and it’s not a live track. I have found, in my twenty-plus years of rock journalism (and forty-plus years of rock listening) that if a song starts with crowd noises and it’s not a live track, then it’s probably some bullshit throwaway ‘jam’. NYT is a slow-burning, bloozy neo-ballad, which would’ve been perfectly fine on any of their first five or six albums, but we are fast-forwarding to the digital age here, so who’s got time for six and a half minutes of this mush? Also, I realize it came out five years later, but INXS’s Need You Tonight is basically the same song just, you know, better. Keep in mind we are no longer bombarded with the music video for Legs seventeen thousand times a day, and absence often makes the heart grow fonder.Īgain, not so much bad as out-of-place. It yielded hit after hit, both on the radio and on MTV, and catapulted the unlikely power-trio into superstardom.īut how good was it, really? And do ZZ Top’s New Wave boogie-synth dance-metal jams still hold up after 34 years? Let’s find out! Here’s the album rearranged from worst to best. Eliminator was El Loco turned to 11, the perfect storm of sound and vision. Emboldened, two years later the band returned with their contemporary masterpiece. You can hear it on cracklers like Groovy Little Hippie Pad and the chewy, cheeky Pearl Necklace.

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The band had already rollercoastered from famine to feast once or twice in their ten plus years of existence by the time they recorded their groundbreaking El Loco album in 1981, so it was certainly a risk to pepper that record with bubbling synthesizers, especially when you consider their core constituency of hard-rocking boogie-children.