Offbeat in New Orleans Reviews The Town and the City

The Town and the City
Hollywood
By Alex Rawls

Los Lobos are one of the handful of bands that genuinely seem to pursue their own muse, so much so that there’s rarely a track or musical decision that seems like a concession of any kind. Rather than viewing its audience as subtle jailers, locking them into musical modes they’ve already explored, Los Lobos seem liberated by their audience to go further. In the case of The Town and the City, that sense of freedom allowed them to make a subtly excellent album, with tracks becoming distinct and special with repeated listens. Only “The Road to Gila Bend” is memorable after the first few listens, and it’s a little reminiscent of the Grateful Dead. Soon, though, “Hold On” and its Latin Playboys-like production emerges, then “No Puedo Mas,” which recalls classic Santana. And so on. Piece by piece, the album becomes rich, complex and beautiful.

The Town and the City is also Los Lobos at their most political, addressing illegal immigrants with the intelligence and subtlety you’d expect. The album opens with “The Valley,” which is sung by someone who has successfully crossed the border and is working “as long as we are able,” but the trade off is “bread on the table,” and the compressed,
Robert Fripp-like ascending guitar line signals this as a good thing. By the album’s closer, “The Town,” a bittersweet song in which the speaker in the song lives in fear, signaled in the first verse by a gunshot in the distance, and his only connection to his hometown is his dreams. In between, Los Lobos bring people to life and turn the political sturm und drang over illegal crossings of our southern borders into a drama that involves people who have bought into the American Dream more genuinely than many of the supporters of the party that wants to fence off that border.