Elastica: “Line Up” (Deceptive Records) / ZZ Top: “Pincushion” (RCA)

‘Line up’ is a jaggedy clever punk-influenced tune. It wears its precursors on its sleeve but manages nonetheless to chisel out its own character thanks mainly to a counter-melodic, funkily scratched guitar lick, idiosyncratic enough to avoid sounding derivative. The associations with Blur and Suede don’t seem to have done them any harm but any comparison with their male counterparts would be entirely futile. Elastica are as English and female as ZZ Top are American and male, I suppose. Apparently the best way to listen to the hirsute, bearded and not so bearded ones is cruising down a highway at eighty miles an hour (only?) in a Chevy. Assuming that most of us poor mortals are not the possessors of gigantically advanced virtual reality machines and have to make do with push bikes and the lay-bys and by-ways of good old Éire, then our fondness for the trio must have something more to do with that irresistible boogie and the unpretentious way it’s delivered. ZZ Top are a law unto themselves anyway and ‘Pincushion’ gets that same groovy treatment they lay out as a challenge to all those who don’t appreciate that life is more cartoon than soap opera. Something of a return to form for Gibbons’ guys. It’s ZZ if you know how, I guess.