Antenna (ZZ Top album)

Occupation

• Billy Gibbons: Vocals, Guitar
• Dusty Hill: vocals, bass
• Frank Beard: Drums

Antenna is the eleventh studio album by American blues-rock band ZZ Top. It was released in January 1994 on RCA Records. The album received in 1994 in the U.S. platinum for one million units sold. Of the total of four singles for the first time not on the Billboard Hot 100 was placed.

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According to the existing record contract with Warner Bros. Records, the band signed leakage in the summer of 1992, a new record deal with RCA Records over five albums. The contract provided in addition to a contract signing fee of five million U.S. dollars against an advance of five million dollars per album, Tantiemensatz of 20 % and a generous budget for music videos. It was also agreed that all rights to the master tapes and the video after the contract ends fall to the band.

The recording of the album took place in the Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, instead. For the first time the band featured the vocal overdubs one, however, renounced the use of synthesizers and turned back to the Texas blues of the publications of the 1970s to. Two of the most recorded songs did not appear on the regular album. "Everything" was a bonus track on the version for the European market using, " Mary's " was released as the B- side of the single "Break Away". The album title is a reminder of the illegal radio stations to the U.S. border with Mexico, who played in the 1950s and 1960s blues and rock 'n ' roll and the Billy Gibbons secretly listened to as a teenager.

The album was a commercial success in Europe, reaching countries such as Sweden and Finland, # 1 on the album charts. Until March 1994, "Antenna " had sold only in Europe and Asia about 800,000 times, in Europe, the band did a five-week campaign with 33 television appearances in 13 different countries.

Title list

Reception

The return of the band to Blue Rock sparked mixed reactions. The online magazine laut.de writes that the album " rough equipped than before, and with considerably more grooving songs " and that the band reducing their music back to the basics. For Cub Koda of Allmusic, the band goes with the album Step into the 1990s, he sees, especially in the guitar work of Billy Gibbons parallels to " Tres Hombres ". The magazine Rock Hard calls the album a step back to the "old, earthy three- man blues - scheme ", which was, however, completed only half-hearted and the Times wrote, " Antenna" is a " coarse album, which sparkles not a bit " and designated ZZ Top as " a band that has lost its golden touch ".