Houndog
Columbia/Legacy

These side trips by members of Los Lobos head in wildly different directions: Latin Playboys take an experimental, audio-vTritT trip through the hood; Cesar Rosas cruises to some jumping nightspot where people party to forget their troubles; Houndog are so blues-bedraggled that they never even get out of the house. None of these projects is as arresting as the whole blended fabric of Los Lobos, but each has something to commend it.

Built around Los Lobans David Hidalgo and Louie PTrez (plus producer Mitchell Froom and engineer Tchad Blake), Dose is a throbbing, kinetic soundscape with an East L.A. street vibe. Deliberately grainy, distorted songs are embedded in a matrix of car engines, chattering voices and white noise -- the bustle and clamor of the barrio half-heard wafting through windows or on busy sidewalks. "You won't get it/It's a Latin trip," Hidalgo matter-of-factly mutters over a narcotic groove. But Dose is addictive. Salty guitar licks pay lubricious tribute to the subject of "Cuca's Blues"; a crazed Cajun fiddle spices up the droll, syncopated "Mustard"; and "Nubian Priestess" wiggles like a snippet from Cornershop's half-cocked cabaret. The album reaches a fevered pitch on "Paletero," a freewheeling, distorted stomp among the urban ruins.

Dose is an intense listen whose thirty-five minutes pass in slow mo. By contrast, Cesar Rosas' more conventional and lengthier Soul Disguise breezes by. Rosas' world isn't exactly rosy, yet his plain-spoken narratives exorcise the blues with a rootsy backbone. Soul Disguise is a stylistic showcase of blues both fast and slow, brassy Tex-Mex soul, accordion-fueled norte±a and a clutch of tunes written with Leroy Preston of the Western-swing revivalists Asleep at the Wheel.

Because of both its casualness and its lack of fidelity, listening to Houndog -- a collaboration between Hidalgo and Mike Halby (a former sideman to Canned Heat and John Mayall) -- is like eavesdropping on a couple of guys moaning the blues in the next apartment. Halby sounds like he's about to expire from his burdens, especially when Hidalgo slows down his groggy, bearlike vocals. Weird as it is, there's something alluring in the gritty, unretouched dialogue between guitar and violin, the disc's down-and-out, after-midnight ambience and the torpid way the duo trudges along a fatalistic path from fire to embers to ashes. (RS 809)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH

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(Posted: Apr 1, 1999)