The Latin Playboys

<font face="verdana,arial,helvetica,geneva" size="+2" color="#ff0000">Cesar Rosas</font> Soul
Disguise Rykodisc, 1999 <font face="verdana,arial,helvetica,geneva" size="+2"
color="#ff0000">Houndog</font> Columbia/Legacy These side trips by members of Los Lobos
head in wildly different directions: Latin Playboys take an experimental, audio-vTritT trip
through the hood; Cesar Rosas cruises to some jumping nightspot where people... More >

Ultimately, they're rock and rollers, and this is more a collection, less a soundscape. But because it still morphs song forms toward the overheard, atmosphere and structure remain the stuff you listen for. Making something of the musique concrète palaver that sounds reflect the life of the people more truly than elitist notes, it evokes everyday street culture with vrooms and honks and revs and rumbles, argument and byplay and revelry and casual chit-chat, and, most important, the garbled layering that inflects all sounds as they are usually heard, notes included. But out of this quiet clamor, both natural outgrowth and blessed relief, emerge little melodies that seem deeply familiar even to a non-Chicano--cultural, tipico, imprinted in memory and collective subconscious. The effect is arty for sure, maybe even genteel in its calculatedly unkempt way. Yet it demonstrates once again that at times arty is like its fraternal twin pretentious--a means to something genuinely difficult and beautiful. (Grade - A)