Four Stars – Critic Jeff Miers says Los Lobos’ “The Town and the City” is a magnificent recording.

Los Lobos, “The Town and the City” (Hollywood). Los Lobos has never delivered an album south of excellent over its two decades together. One record, however, has long stood out as a pinnacle – the early-’90s release “Kiko,” a multi-idiomatic blend of musics married to startlingly imaginative production values. The band followed “Kiko” with records that are almost as brilliant, but not until the release of “The Town and the City” has the group matched “Kiko’s” dreamlike magnificence. This new record packs in everything that Lobos has always done well – willfully twisting tropes pulled from Mexican-American music, jazz, Latin, blues and folk and coming up with a sound that deserves to be called unique. “The Town and the City” has plenty of the magic dust that elevated “Kiko” toward the sublime as well, much of it coming courtesy of the brilliance of the arrangements, the subtlety of the compositions, and the hypnotic, wide-screen imagination of the production – handled by the band members themselves, and given a final sweetening by Tchad Blake’s mix. A fully realized masterpiece from a band we should expect nothing less from.

4 Stars (Jeff Miers)