Harp Magazine Reviews Lobos CD

When Wilco was reaping critical hosannas for the disjointed desolation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, some Los Lobos fans must have wondered if Jeff Tweedy was Brett Ratner to David Hidalgo’s Bryan Singer. A full decade before black and white documentaries were made about Chicago’s favorite skronk-country rockers, the best band ever to come out of East L.A. released Kiko, a masterpiece about disconnection from love and loss that
didn’t try to break your heart, it just did. Los Lobos has spent the years since wandering in the wilderness of oxymoronically dull experimentation, a path Wilco appears poised to follow. With The Town and the City Los Lobos finally find their way back to greatness; this raging quintet hasn’t let the random squawks and sampled beats obscure
the instrumental muscle that made 2005’s Live at the Fillmore (or any Los Lobos
concert) such a treat. The band, in short, is once again playing to its considerable strengths. “Little things all around me/Little things I could not see,” Hidalgo sings, and with a band this good, the little things add up.

By Steve Hyden