The Latin Playboys

This squalling, lo-fi, angular LP is one of the best things the members of Los Lobos have ever done. Begun as an outlet for the band's experimental leanings, the Playboys meander through textures, picking and discarding ideas and building a sonic universe where hard rock, the blues and cumbia coexist. Moments of beauty show up everywhere -- peep "Ten Believers" and "Gone."

The brooding spirit of Los Lobos' last album, Kiko, hovers over this side project by Lobos'
David Hidalgo and Louie Perez and their coconspirators, Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake.
Recorded almost entirely on a four-track tape machine, 14 songs were finished in as many
days. The result is an expansive meld of R&B, Tex Mex, rock, soul and blues that is cinematic
in scope. The tunes were composed in true collaborative fashion: Hidalgo's musi... More >

On Kiko, new producer Mitchell Froom, aided materially by wizard engineer and aural archivist Tchad Blake, transmuted Los Lobos's folkier textures into a kind of amniotic sound-surf, sustaining their rock noises and rhythms in swells of offhand accordion, rippling guitar arpeggio, whiskey-breathed brass, and articulated percussion. Here David Hidalgo and Louis Pérez rework Kiko outtakes to undercut the band's Springsteenian quest for meaning. Whenever the lyrical impressions lapse toward the stolid or sodden, they're lifted by the spare, bent music: echoes and silences, filtered voices and ancient klaxons, Indian film sounds and scratchy samples of street bebop, jagged Beefheart rhythms and idle guitar thoughts, friendly melodies from a Victrola perched on a barrio windowsill. Magical, mystical, the kind of inner-child fantasia that usually guarantees self-indulgence, but here is a field recording from two amigos' mutual unconscious. (Grade - A+)