ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Los Lobos
TIN CAN TRUST PROPER RECORDS 9.8.10 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
It’s twelve years since Los Lobos put out their twenty year retrospective, Just Another Band From East LA, and the band continue to plough their furrow of Mexican-tinged blues, rock and R’n’B. They’re a savvy band – picking up hits from Richie Valens covers for the bio-pic, La Bamba, in 1987 and covers of Disney songs (I Want To Be Like You). Then they hit pay-dirt by supporting the Grateful Dead and covering one of their jauntier ditties, Bertha. As Bruce Hornsby’ll tell you, having anything to do with The Grateful Dead will get you Deadheads at every gig you play – and they won’t just come to one gig on a tour, they’ll follow you around, bumping up your record and ticket sales. Even cleverer, then, to put another Dead cover (West LA Fadeaway) on this disc as well as getting the Dead’s chief lyricist, Robert Hunter, to write you a new song. Emphasising their dues paid, they borrow Susan Tedeschi for the opening track – a blues singer who worked with a post-Dead offshoot and married blues guitarist, Derek Trucks of The Allman Brothers Band. This is the usual mix of blues and rock, delving into latin cumbia for Yo Canto (I Sing) and traditional Mexican dance style, norteño for Mujer Ingrata. The band are long enough in the tooth that they know how to be accomplished and rough around the edges at the right times. There are plenty of guitar solos and atmospherically grungey blues riff, with a nice dose of Louisiana-tinged horns. The band recorded it mostly live in the studio, giving an authentically cohesive sound with a dark blues feel sometimes, where you can hear the shape of the room, like some cellar bar. The instrumental, Do The Murray, is a jiving rocking blues with as much fretwork as you could wish for. The Robert Hunter song, All My Bridges Burning, is a mixture of the elegiac and the survivor in tone, combining the tone of The Grateful Dead’s Days Between with Los Lobos’ early track, Will The Wolf Survive. Long lyrical guitar solos give a real mood to this one. West LA Fadeaway, however, adds little to the original, except for being more lively and bluesy than the usual ploddy studio Dead (like Los Lobos, a band much better live than on disc). This is a solid set with no surprises for fans of the band and plenty to recommend it to novitiate fans of bluesy rock with a spicy twist. www.loslobos.org |
