Album Reviews

Nothing Los Lobos recorded previous to 1992’s Kiko could have prepared anyone for this piece of sustained, surreal brilliance. Dreamlike sonic vistas, ominous lyrical horizons, mysterious musical crevices, and spring-like rhythmic compressions and extensions combine to create a dayglo, funhouse-like environment filled with familiar, but oddly drawn musical elements.

The chill inducing title tune, with its creepy, slinky rhythm, its haunted saxophones, its "lavender moon" and "big black cat," is a self-contained macabre vision more powerful than any MTV video. And yet, beneath the daring musical invention is a familiar bedrock of musical Americana. There's swing jazz, blues, rock and all of the other roots- including the group's ethnic ones, but they've been strangely, and wonderfully twisted.

The group takes on very serious subject matter but manages to do so without preaching.

If you hear The Band poking around the musical corner it is not a coincidence. Hidalgo and Perez traveled to Woodstock to help the group write songs before starting on this album. "Two Janes" sounds oddly familiar- like The Band's cover of "The Long Black Veil." If any Band album sows the seeds of Kiko it's Stagefright, which contains the mystical "Daniel and The Sacred Harp"—one of the group's more magical songs. But the influences range far and wide—intentional or otherwise, which is part of the album's fascination. Listen to "Just A Man" and you'll hear the Robin Trower edition of Procol Harum.

The Hidalgo/Perez team comes up with its most affecting, tender yet tough batch of tuneful songs like "Short Side of Nothing," and Cesar Rosas turns up the heat with the gritty "That Train Don't Stop Here Anymore," and the hard scrapple "Wicked Rain."

The playing is intense, the rhythms relentless, the musical choices breathtakingly fresh, and Froom and Blake brush with iridescent paint on a black velvet canvas achieving a perfect subject/object match. While not much sounds "real" in the natural sense, the sonic picture is smooth and clean, with outstanding bass extension and definition. Overall clarity is superb, the mix is masterful, and the overall spectrum balance is ideal, though the top end sounds tucked and rolled as intended. A masterpiece, period.

When first issued during the 1990’s vinyl drought, a UK release sourced from who knows what and pressed in Holland didn’t sound as good as the original CD mastered by Dave Collins, known to some as Mr. EveAnna Manley.

Mobile Fidelity’s new 180g mastering (also available on SACD) is far superior to that original CD in every way: it’s more spacious, more full bodied on bottom and extended on top. The recording is hardly a “band playing live in a room” and features a lot of co-producer Mitch Froom’s tape loop wizardry and studio tricks in service of the concept but it’s still a very good sounding, dynamic studio record. If you want to hear the band’s best sounding record, and one that’s also worthwhile musically, check out The Neighborhood (Slash/Warner Brothers 26131-1 LP) featuring John Hiatt and Levon Helm. Hopefully Mobile Fidelity will get around to reissuing that one as well.

If you’ve somehow not yet gotten into Los Lobos, this is the one with which to start the musical conversation, especially since for all intents and purposes it has never before been available on vinyl other than on the aforementioned not good sounding limited edition.

Please read the two part Los Lobos interview originally published in The Tracking Angle:

Part 1

Part 2