Los Lobos continue their double life on “Tin Can Trust.” Onstage (as at Bowery Ballroom,
where they are to perform Tuesday) Los Lobos are a good-natured,
multicultural jam band with roots in the blues, early rock ’n’ roll,
Mexican norteño music and California folk-rock. Yet in the studio those
same roots serve the band’s increasing introspection: a sense of
weariness without resignation, tenacity toward no sure goal, and
perennially unfulfilled longing. It’s steeped in the blues but distinct
from it: less angry or humorous, more pensive and unresolved.
On their haunting 2006 album, “The Town and the City,” Los Lobos
connected that mood to the journeys of immigrants and restless
travelers. Despite the four-year gap between albums of new Los Lobos
songs, “Tin Can Trust” comes across as a strong sequel.
The wanderings continue on “Tin Can Trust,” though now they are more
allegorical than geographic. The album opens with “Burn It Down” by Los
Lobos’s main songwriting team: its singer and player of anything with
strings, David Hidalgo, and its drummer, Louie Pérez. In a Celtic-tinged
modal tune with fiddle and Conrad Lozano’s upright bass, Mr. Hidalgo
sings, “The time had come for me to run away,” and adds, “Once I go
there is no coming back.” Later a distorted electric-guitar tremolo
sweeps through like a conflagration.
Cesar Rosas, the band’s other guitarist and songwriter, and its raspier
lead singer, also sees flames and farewells in the mournful “All My
Bridges Burning,” written with the Grateful Dead
lyricist Robert Hunter. Another voyage is summed up in the
Hidaldo-Pérez song “21 Spanishes,” a bluesy reimagining of the Spanish
arrival in the Americas and its aftermath: “Their blood was often
mixed/Now they all hang out together, and play guitar for kicks.”
For most of the album, tempos are slow and deliberate, with only a few
upbeat diversions; minor chords predominate. “Jupiter or the Moon” is
aching and bereft, as Mr. Hidalgo sings, “Where did you go, go so soon?”
In “Tin Can Trust,” he’s in love but utterly destitute.
The album’s closely huddled sound, produced by the band, can be as
telling as the songs. Los Lobos made “Tin Can Trust” in a small studio
in East Los Angeles, the part of the city where the band got started in
1973. Instruments are heard seemingly unadorned; a door creaks, voices
drift in. It’s an album about facing limitations, drawing what hope
there is from seeing each situation clearly. JON PARELES
SEU JORGE AND ALMAZ
(Stones Throw)
I didn’t like this at first. The baritone singer Seu Jorge
is the rare Brazilian musician with an international audience willing
to go more than halfway to meet him. He may have found that audience
more through his movie roles in “City of God” and “The Life Aquatic With
Steve Zissou,” but his music has gotten direct, smart, intuitive about
differences in taste between generations and cultures; his brand of cool
leaps over most barriers, and won’t lose currency quickly. As a singer
he’s a charismatic natural, and he could become great. By a certain way
of thinking, he shouldn’t be messing around right now.
In Almaz,
a new band, he’s messing around. He’s collaborating with the drummer
Pupillo and the guitarist Lucio Maia, two of the key members of Nação
Zumbi, from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, who, at the top
of their game, make some of the best music in the world: deeply
rhythmic, tough and smoky collisions of rock and surf and reggae and
samba. “Seu Jorge and Almaz” is an album of covers of Brazilian,
American and European music from the ’70s: floppy and spacey, a bit like
a demo, charming and terribly hip, close to what you might imagine as
the intersection of Seu Jorge and Nação Zumbi at the bottom of their
respective games.
There’s “The Model,” by Kraftwerk, redone as deep-space reggae; “Girl
You Move Me,” by the obscure, early ’70s French funk band Cane and Able;
a maximally chilled-out, woolgathering version of Roy Ayers’s
“Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” (It’s produced by Mario Caldato, Jr.,
who’s worked with the Beastie Boys
in the past, as well as Seu Jorge and Nação Zumbi individually.) Is
this what we want to see some of the most exciting musicians in the
world doing? Crate-digging with deep echo? Slouching through stoner
jams?
I’m still not convinced, but I got happier by the third listen. This is a
slight record, but a good one. It’s not using obscurity as a cudgel.
(It includes a remake of Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You.”) It’s pretty
blissful music, stubborn in its antiprofessionalism, soulful in its
garage-iness. It makes strong and simple rearrangements of formerly lush
songs. It’s not trying too hard, and then suddenly it is: in
“Cristina,” Seu Jorge hollers the refrain as loud as his voice will go,
channeling his source, the singer Tim Maia; in Jorge Ben’s “Errare
Humanum Est,” the whole performance, with thick crusts of surf guitar
and shuffling drums, takes on a mysterious strength, a trancelike
shimmer. BEN RATLIFF
DR. JOHN
and the Lower 911
“Tribal” (429)
The time is ripe for a really good new album from Dr. John. Over the last few months HBO
broadcast the first season of “Treme,” a series about the resilient
quirks of New Orleans musical culture, Dr. John’s lifelong milieu, in
the months after Hurricane Katrina.
(Like many of his peers he appeared on the show as himself.) The last
few months have also seen the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and its
repercussions. Given his role as a grizzled voice of conscience — he
already had a recent song called “Black Gold,” written with Bobby
Charles — it feels right to be hearing from him now.
But “Tribal” isn’t a chronicle of tragedy, like his 2005 album “Sippiana Hericane” (Blue Note), nor an admonitory broadside,
like his 2008 release “City That Care Forgot” (429). Instead it’s a
celebration of local customs and universal concerns, more imploring than
indignant. The opener, “Feel Good Music,” lays out his agenda, with an
air of voodoo enchantment.
At 69, Dr. John
sounds much the same as in his wily youth, singing in a drawling croak
and playing piano and organ with a principal stake in rhythm. On
“Tribal” he digs hard into the New Orleans rhythm and blues on which he
cut his teeth. His sinewy band, the Lower 911, which will join him on
Monday and Tuesday at City Winery, manages to riff on a classic sound without ever going retro.
Much the same could be said of Dr. John himself. “Change of Heart,”
“When I’m Right (I’m Wrong)” and “Jinky Jinx,” which appear here in that
order, might have come from almost any period in his career. (That’s
not a complaint.) Another tune, “Potnah,” fits that description just as
well, maybe better. So too “Manoovas,” which features a guest turn by
the guitarist Derek Trucks. (Just pretend he’s Duane Allman.)
The beating heart of “Tribal,” though, is a scattering of songs about
struggle, like “Lissen at Our Prayer,” a slow-simmering environmental
plea; “Big Gap,” about income inequality; and “Only in America,” a
lamentation incanted over an Afro-Cuban groove. Dr. John isn’t
interested in any blame game here; “Them” skewers the very idea of
finger-pointing.
What counts — as he suggests with “Music Came,” featuring his bassist,
David Barard, on lead vocals and Donald Harrison Jr. on alto saxophone —
is the redemptive power of art, something in which trust can be placed.