Like a couple others, this has removed some of my misperceptions, which were pretty much based on their MTV appearances of the time.
Got off to a good start with I Thank You, nice groove, nice vocals. Then backed up by a number of decent songs I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide (great title for a song), Dust My Broom and Cheap Sunglasses being the best ones for me. It's really the Billy Gibbons show but that's ok as the other two provide admirable support.
As an aside, Manic Mechanic really made me chuckle. I once worked for a US firm and for a time was responsible for risk assessing the major projects. The rest of my team were from a variety of states themselves and as I was from out of town took great delight in (only half jokingly) stereotyping for me the various divisions or branches depending on which state or city they were based in. Didn't do much in Texas and Houston was the one place I dealt with but what I remember about the branch there was being told by one of my own team, and I paraphrase, "the thing you need to know about these guys is you'll think they are quite straightforward but just when you think you've worked them out they'll pull some really weird shit on you and then equally quickly go back to normal as if nothing ever happened". Couldn't help but think of this when listening to that song!
As I've mentioned before I listened to a number of their earlier albums too. I think I prefer them and definitely so with Rio Grande Mud and Tres Hombres and for that reason I was going to give this a 6. However, on the basis that having gone from having no interest in them before this pick and now being very happy to include some of their songs onto playlists I'm going to loan a point from those albums to this one and give it 7/10 (with apologies to the more methodical scorers on the thread!).
