Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Review
Los Lobos offer up one of their most acclaimed albums in a live performance.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 4, 2012
Do you ever feel you were born in the wrong country or even the wrong continent? I hail from the American west and
northwest, but I have been inordinately drawn to Latin music of all sorts since I was a very small kid. While my major
obsession has always been the beautiful music of Brazil, especially the seductive, langorous Bossa Nova, I have a soft
spot in my heart for all sorts of other styles which sometimes touch frankly fairly tangentially on the Latin idiom. Los
Lobos is a band that at once celebrates their Hispanic heritage while at the same time not being slaves to it, but their
interesting combination of traditions has always appealed to my "Latin music loving" heart. The band
has carved out its own very unique blend of Chicano rock, rockabilly, rhythm and blues and just good old fashioned rock
'n' roll for several decades now, racking up an impressive list of chart hits and several Grammy Awards. The fact that
the band itself moved through a wide variety of genres as it refined its own identity is testament to the hugely
disparate influences Los Lobos brings to its songcraft and performances. And it's notable (no pun intended) to see just
how far the band had come from its first really overwhelming mainstream chart success, its cover of Richie Valens' iconic
"La Bamba" in 1987, to the much more freewheeling and multidisciplinary
Kiko album in 1992, a relatively short
span of five years. Though
Kiko didn't exactly burn up the charts at the time of its release, it's come to be
appreciated as one of the finest albums in Los Lobos' remarkable
oeuvre, an album that combines all sorts of
unexpected influences while at the same time remaining remarkably consistent and cohesive.
Los Lobos Kiko
Live is a very engaging combination of a live performance of the album in February of 2006 at the House of Blues in
San Diego along with some equally engaging and even illuminating interview segments with various band members.
Though it's possible to view
Kiko Live with just the concert footage (more or less, anyway—see the
Supplements section below for more details), some of the most interesting content here is actually in the little
"confessional" interviews with the various band members that crop up in between every two or three songs. While
some of these sequences deal with the inspiration for whatever song is coming next, there's also a lot of really nice
background given on the band and its formation and evolution through the years. This is a band that has been
together in one shape or form since many of the members were in high school in Los Angeles, and that lifelong
camaraderie is what gives Los Lobos' music its special and very distinctive spark.
One of the funny things that comes out in the interview segments is that the band rarely rehearses and that going back
to the songs that make up
Kiko was a (re)learning experience, especially since several of the songs haven't
matriculated into the band's regular touring or performance repertoire. There's some fun footage of the band setting
up shop in a living room of one of the members and trying to remember just how certain songs go again.
There's a bit of band history interwoven in several anecdotes as well, even those that deal more ostensibly with how a
certain song came to be written. While we get a nice mini-tour of Garfield High (at least from the outside), where
several of the guys met each other in tenth grade, there's some fascinating tidbits revealed surrounding the creation of
"Angels With Dirty Faces", the band's ode to the homeless. It turns out they were creating demos in an area of Los
Angeles that they term "almost like a third world nation" in terms of how many street people there were, even whole
families living in cardboard boxes, and seeing those sad folks on the way to and from the recording sessions inspired
the song.
In terms of the music part of this program, the band is in mostly great shape vocally and instrumentally, with only a few
ragged edges showing from time to time. What's so fun about this album is how wonderfully inventive it is. One song
will have a Mellotron and squeeze box and the next will have a harp and Andes pan flute feel. Through it all, Los Lobos
rocks with energy but a very relaxed feel, and they are able to evoke their heritage without sounding like a third rate
Xerox copy of it. The final song brings on what looks like a bunch of younger or even student players to accompany the
band, and it's great to see tradition being passed on to a new generation.
The actual concert of
Kiko Live: February 24, 2006 consists of the following songs:
- 01. Dream In Blue
- 02. Wake Up Dolores
- 03. Angels With Dirty Faces
- 04. That Train Don't Stop Here
- 05. Kiko and the Lavender Moon
- 06. Saint Behind The Glass
- 07. Reva's House
- 08. When the Circus Comes
- 09. Arizona Skies
- 10. Short Side of Nothing
- 11. Two Janes
- 12. Wicked Rain
- 13. Whiskey Trail
- 14. Just a Man
- 15. Peace
- 16. Rio de Tenampa
Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray, Video Quality
Los Lobos Kiko Live: Feburary 24, 2006 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory with an AVC encoded
1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This high definition presentation has several elegantly crisp moments, but it's also hampered by a
somewhat soft looking image, especially (and rather strangely) in some of the interview segments, which don't quite pop
with the level of fine object detail one would expect them to. The concert footage looks really quite good most of the time,
though the lighting scheme features several specialty lights beaming hues straight down, often in deep blue, which creates
posterizing effects on both the upstage area as well as the players' heads and hair. There is also very slight banding
noticeable when the lights change. Generally, though, this is a nicely sharp and well detailed offering that should please
the band's many fans.
Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
In one of the interview segments on
Los Lobos Kiko Live: Feburary 24, 2006, the band talks about how they pretty
much set their own schedule and tempo for recording, and have never felt beholden to any outside force to do things other
than the way
they want to do them. That might account for the almost haphazard set of releases the band has
offered through the years. This is obviously a band not incredibly intent on burning up the charts every couple of months
with a zingy new single. That also means that Los Lobos offers a rare degree of sincerity and integrity in the often
cutthroat world of corporate rock. The fact that so many of these guys have played together since they were teens makes
the group unusually cohesive and insular, without being "isolationist", so to speak; they obviously have a strong rapport
not just with each other, but with their audience. This is a really interesting documentary that offers some very compelling
"confessional" anecdotes mixed in with a great live reading of one of their most acclaimed albums. With solid (if
occasionally problematic) video and fantastic audio, this release comes
Highly recommended.
