The Latin Playboys

The Latin Playboys is a willfully offbeat but artistically rewarding detour for Los Lobos' primary songwriters David Hidalgo and Louie Perez. Their journey into the hazier end of the sound spectrum is greased by studio alchemists Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, the team behind Los Lobos' sonically adventurous 1992 album, Kiko. Latin Playboys takes leftover Kiko demos and transforms them into weird little pieces of border-music exotica, lo-fi blues-rock and acid-folk. Allusive, dreamlike, and disturbing, Latin Playboys is a side project that's anything but frivolous; indeed, it's the equal of any Los Lobos album. Dose goes even further out, employing steel-drum grooves, Javanese gamelan, West African guitar lines, and Eastern violins in the service of Perez's lyrical vignettes about childhood, family, and barrio memories. (GREG KOT)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide