Hear Jeff Beck’s First Studio Track in Five Years ‘Tribal’
Last year, Jeff Beck and ZZ Top traded riffs and solos on a summer tour filled with guitar pyrotechnics, with the former tearing through 40-year-old favorites like “Going Down” and newer covers of tunes such as Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Live+, Beck’s fifth concert LP since 2008, compiles some of the 70-year-old’s best performances of 2014, but it closes with his first two studio recordings in five years. Below, hear “Tribal,” a fast-paced, nearly instrumental powerhouse that blazes forward on the back of a lean, distorted riff. Veronica Bellino follows with an energetic beat, Rhonda Smith plays bass and Ruth Lorenzo shouts over the top.
“‘Tribal’ was the first thing I came up with, on day one of the L.A. recording sessions,” Beck tells Rolling Stone. “It was meant to be for extreme club/dance-type music, and it went through several radical changes that just didn’t work. So with Ruth’s vocal we stripped it back to just me and Veronica, with Rhonda’s bass dubbed later, which brought back the wild roughness that I was originally after.”
Live+ will be released on May 19th via Atco Records; it can be preordered here. After doing a handful of make-up dates with ZZ Top (the tour had been cut short after a hip injury suffered by bassist Dusty Hill) Beck will spend the next two weeks playing solo shows in the Midwest. In the mean time, he continues work on a full studio LP.