Track Listing

1. Valley
2. Hold On
3. Road to Gila Bend
4. Chuco's Cumbia
5. If You Were Only Here Tonight
6. Luna
7. Two Dogs and a Bone
8. Little Things
9. City
10. Don't Ask Why
11. No Puedo M�s
12. Free Up
13. Town

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23803 in Music
• Brand: Dig
• Released on: 2006-09-12
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced
• Dimensions: .18 pounds

Album Description
The 13-track set--fittingly, the disc is the 13th studio album of the band's 30-year-plus career--was recorded over the last several months, with the band doing its own production work. Tchad Blake, who's worked with the group for many of its past albums, handled mixing duties. The album partially reflects the East Los Angeles roots-rockers' experience as de facto immigrants in their own country, as well as unease with the current political situation in the land. The band is currently on an open-ended touring schedule, which is typical of their roadwork.

Amazon.com
After variously celebrating their 30th anniversary with the star-studded The Ride, documenting their bracing live shows on Live at the Fillmore and doing a little intimate musical retrenchment on the self-released Acoustic En Vivo, Los Lobos returned to the studio with creative exploration on their minds. The result is their most sonically adventurous, thematically taut collection since the heady days of Kiko and Colossal Head. With lyrics penned mostly by multi-instrumentalist Louis Perez, the album's first-person narrative views a myriad of larger issues through slices of local life, from the immigrants' physical and spiritual travails of "The Valley" and "Hold On" to the liturgical grace of "Little Things" and the haunting impressionism of "The City." The musical tack is even more adventurous, a melange of diverse flavors that ranges from the infectious calo Spanglish patois of Cesar Rosa's "Chuco's Cumbia" and neo-norteno "The Road to Gila Bend" to the chunky r&b groove of "Don't Ask Why," the Caribbean-Latin fusion of "No Pueda Mas" and the shadowy, jazz reflectiveness of the "The Town." The Lobos blend it all into a compelling sonic landscape, one that's tamed the playful, psychedelic spirit of Perez and David Hidalgo's free-spirited Latin Playboys side project and focused it into a band context with rich rewards at every turn. -- Jerry McCulley

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Sublime
A sophisticated record by a mature band. While traces of their bad boy roots rock remain, this record shows a older, more contemplative group of artists. On their landmark debut album they had an anthem of sorts about the plight, courage, and determination of the Latino immigrant with the soaring "Will the Wolf Survive?" Here, there are no anthems, but the story is now filled in with multiple shades and tones. What the boys kicked in the music scene door with back in the Eighties is now voiced with a tired wisdom, regret, and bittersweet pride.

Standout tracks are all over this record; among the best has to be Hidalgo and Perez's "Little Things." Strongly evoking Procol Harem's "A Whiter Shade of Pale," it's that kind of Lobos tune that can just kill you where you stand. An aching, gorgeous and beautifully sad masterpiece.

Caesar Rosas, goes all George Harrison on us this time out and only gives up two songs. Although his "No Puedo Mas" coming towards the end of the record is clearly its furious blues-rock highlight without a doubt. Anyone bemoaning the lack of "rock" on the record should skip straight to this burner and turn it up nice and loud.

But that's not what this record is about. It's about the desperate, spooky "Hold On," the Will the Wolf Survive-like "Road to Gila Bend," the bone-weary, resigned "If Only You were Here Tonight," (a song in which you'd swear Hidalgo's guitar is channeling the ghost of Jerry Garcia), and the foreboding final track "Town."

All-in-all, an excellent group of songs that is strangely reminiscent of Bob Dylan's recent brooding work. A album that requires multiple listens, your attention and your heart.
A keeper.

Victims of their own talent
If this album had been issued by a band whose name consisted of a number and a noun; and whose members were all in their twenties, decked out in skinny glasses, black leather, little beards, and kinky hair, and whose album art consisted of the band members staring glumly into the eye of a camera,this CD would be HUGE.

So if you've never heard of Los Lobos; or if you think they're just a bunch of pudgy throwbacks to the roots-music movement; or if you liked Kiko but lost interest after that; or even if you love Los Lobos so much you'd buy anything they recorded, why not try a little experiment: buy the CD; take it out of the packaging without looking at any of it; slap it into your audio system; grab a comfortable chair and place it right in the center of the stereo image; turn out the lights; and listen as closely as you possibly can.

Who are these guys? How the hell did they come up with these soundscapes, timbres, moods, and fleeting highlights? How come, just when you're expecting the band to boost the volume over the top, throw the drums in your face, and "like, totally rock out," they drop the volume and add a nuance that is more exhilarating than a rave up would ever be? How, with state of the art recording techniques, do they make their songs sound hazy, intriguingly distant, like old lp's without the scratches? Who knows? Wait, I've GOT to know.

But hey, did you hear that? What the guitars are doing? If he weren't so humble, it would be hard to believe that the lead player could be capable of playing so many styles so perfectly, and yet so personally. I wait in vain for the cliches. He's in the pantheon, allright.

What's with the bass player? What, no funky thumb-wacking, no treble-booster? Is that even a bass guitar, when it insuates itself so fluidly into the interior of the chords? Hell, sometimes the bass note is the only thing making the chords change.

How come I believe what the singer's saying? When he's expressing desperation and weariness, I want to back away. I don't want to hear about it.

SO ANYWAY, how do you like this new record by "Ace44," the "Gleaming Swords," "Heatrash," or whatever name you want to give this band?

It's one of the best records you ever heard in your life, by any band, at any time.

Forget what you think you know about Los Lobos. It's them, but it's more than them this time.

John

East LA Sgt Peppers
This is the deal. I'd only amplify the previous positive reviews, which I admire: great, great recording, and I'd also mention that the atmospherics, as my music pals call them, are more integrated here than on about any CD I've heard in a very long while, maybe ever. There is just stuff here that continually surprises you, and not in some obnoxious, "clever" way. It's all part of the portrait they're painting, the immigrant life In California. Like the dab of yellow on a great painting that makes you see everything, except the dab of yellow. It's the trigger.

The Playing is explosive when necessary, subtle when appropriate. Probably their strongest lyrics yet. (I'm picky, because I have a book out that deals with immigrant LA, the source of my own writer's inspiration. They kick me real bad here, and for that I'm grateful.)

The guitar performances are especially unbelievably fine. Anyone who has heard "Tomorrow Never Knows" on the box set know that these guys can sound as if George Martin had run the guitar track backwards. But they can run it real time.

Man, what an accomplishment from los veteranos del Norte. And, I say this as a listener for many years, there is NO BAND better than Los Lobos. Nobody. Nowhere. The Beatles of East LA. Not a small accomplishment. Amigos siempre. Amigos de mi corazon.

My Spanish sucks. Forgive me, amigos. Your record is the best of this and many years.