One of the best ever!
This is argueably ZZ Top's best effort, and one of the greatest rock albums ever released. Every song is solid right threw till the end!

Amazon Should Hire Me To Write Reviews
"Dusty Hill's heart-stopping drumming and Frank Beard's sturdy bass."

Hey, Jann, when did Dusty and Frank switch instruments?! Do I win a gift certificate for finding that glaring error?

Anyway, this is a very good introduction to the band. Their gritty rock and blues got a bit of a studio polish but it worked as its their best-selling album.

Signature album for one of America's great bands
First, folks at Amazon, I must point out a glaring mistake in your own review of "Eliminator" - Dusty Hill is the bassist and Frank Beard is the drummer in ZZTop. I find that boner most annoying when you consider how big this band is. It's like saying Keith Richards is the vocalist for the Stones. Do your homework - it makes me want to discredit every word you wrote.
That aside, after much thought, I rounded up a list of bands that have crossed the line from highly successful outfits to icons and musical institutions, an honor very few musicians will ever see. We have to consider how the work by these artists become part of the lexicon of society, not just sell records. This is strictly my opinion, and others will agree and disagree, but hey, it's all in fun anyway. Those bands include the Beach Boys, especially Brian Wilson's production work, the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and ZZTop.
Although some of their later albums didn't reach the status of "Eliminator", it wasn't because the material wasn't great, which is important when we consider the level of popularity ZZTop enjoys. Other big bands like Aerosmith and KISS, for example, have suffered severe low points along the way, and both bands have basically regurgitated old material for years now, content to cruise on their names alone.
ZZTop have not made that mistake. "Eliminator" isn't the greatest of their career, but ranks very high, thanks to the fearless blend of the old Texas blues and synthesizers, which could have been a disaster in less capable hands. Instead, we have anthems that will be with us forever, especially "Sharp Dressed Man", the most popular cut off this album. "Gimme All Your Lovin'" and "Legs" follow closely behind.
"Eliminator" makes a good start point for exploring the catalogue of ZZTop, both backward and forward. Earlier works show the drenched blues and sizzling guitar of Billy Gibbons, who is a genius on the fretboard. He comes full circle right up to "Mescalero", which is once again blues soaked but also heavily distorted, or "fuzzy", in his words.
Only those lost in caves or confined to certain religious compounds are not familiar with the "little ol' band from Texas", and it's their loss.

Great Tunes!
Very good album. Glad to add it to my collection. CD and package in great shape. No delivery problems. I would order from here again.

"Might as well face it, you're addicted to love"
Eliminator is one of my favourite albums. It works on several different levels, and it works well. On the surface it is a great collection of catchy pop songs. I can dance to them, hum them, play air guitar to them, shave to them, paint the ceiling to them etc. There isn't a boring song on the record, and the album isn't too long. It doesn't cost too much and the cover looks nice. I can hold it up in front of my face, and pretend that I am a car. Eliminator also works as a coherent whole. The music is uniform, but instead of being repetitive and dull, the album instead feels like an excellent half-hour composition divided into movements.

On another level, Eliminator is a thinky album. It's a writey album. I like to ponder it, it sets my mind in motion. Eliminator is a clever scientific musical experiment. It was a conscious attempt to change ZZ Top's style, to make the band more contemporary, and it was an enormous success, on both an artistic and a commercial level. I'm sure that old-time fans of the group might have been upset at the disco rhythms, but only the most uptight square could fail to be moved by "Gimme All Your Lovin'" or "Sharp Dressed Man". I imagine that kids in 1983 might have thought that ZZ Top was a brand-new band, a modern boogie group with a clever retro style, and videos with hot women in them. You know, like Robert Palmer. He made records in the 1970s, but when he did that video for "Addicted to Love" in 1985, an entire new generation assumed that he had just come from nowhere, with a bevy of hot women. Did I mention hot women? Robert Palmer had hot women, and ZZ Top also had hot women. I know this because I have just checked on the Youtube. ZZ Top's women are not as hot as Robert Palmer's women, although it has to be said that any woman would look hot when stood next to ZZ Top. Perhaps that was ZZ Top's way of attracting women. Robert Palmer, on the other hand, did not have to do anything special to attract women, in fact he had to shoo them away, they pestered him so much that he moved to Switzerland, and died young. But I digress.

With Eliminator, ZZ Top did something that Genesis and The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and The Who and Paul McCartney failed to do, they moved with the times without trashing their reputation. Of the band's contemporaries, I can only think of Yes having achieved the same feat, although that was done by essentially ditching all that was Yes about Yes except for the vocals.

So, as a musical experiment, Eliminator works brilliantly. I cannot think of another album that combines disco and guitar rock and synth-pop so well without sounding awful. It's a deceptively simple record as well. The drums are basically straightforward four-to-the-floor pulse beat, all the way throughout every song, a mixture of drum machine and real live human drummer. Ordinarily this unvarying drum style would be monotonous, and in a way it *is* monotonous, but it's monotonous in a good way, hypnotic rather than boring. The twin guitar lines are often very complex, but they are mixed so that they become a backdrop. The synths are generally tasteful, restricted to pulse-bass and a few swooshy pads. The vocals have a distant, unemotional quality that sounds cool rather than affected. The songs are classically structured rock tunes, none of them have a rapping bit.

On a further level, and perhaps this is unintentional, Eliminator has a timeless quality. It's a period piece, but it has dated well. There's nothing offensive about the overall sound. The music is classical. The dual-guitar playing is technically impressive and the guitar tone is still awesome, although subdued. The lyrics are generally dumb beyond parody, with sexual metaphors that would make Roy "Chubby" Brown feel uncomfortable, but that just adds to the charm. ZZ Top were real men, you see, from an era that did not value manly manliness. Nowadays they come across as endearingly retro and harmless. Eliminator has dated much, much better than "Afterburner", the band's next album, which came out in 1985. Afterburner really does sound like a mid-80s record, with fake drums and fake guitars that could have come out of an arcade machine. They're both cheesy records, in the sense that you couldn't take them to a posh dinner party without people laughing at you and mocking you and deriding your taste, but Eliminator is likeably cheesy whereas Afterburner is just an anonymous mid-80s synth rock record.

In its day, Eliminator was a big popular success, although the critics thought it was just another modern pop-rock record. Today it is grudgingly respected as a classic of the period, but I believe it deserves more. There are few albums that entertain me all the way through, that I can listen to in one sitting without being bored. Kraftwerk's "Computer World" is one. This is another. It's the musical equivalent of one of those films that you can just sit and watch; Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Where Eagles Dare etc. It's easy to overlook that kind of entertainment, but it's precious and rare and should be cherished. I would love it if Eliminator goes into the time capsule.