Along with collecting one of the broadest back catalogues in popular music, the 2000 box set El Cancionero Más y Más (Rhino) did something else. It made a convincing argument that, in terms of pure musical value, Los Lobos are the best American band of the last quarter-century. Or make that a cool 30 years: guitarist-vocalist David Hidalgo and company -- at the time, four smart-ass Chicano hippies from East LA -- played their first paying gig at a picnic in 1973. From the start, they were as fluent with Hendrix and the Beatles as they were with their parents' Mexican records. Playing as Lobos del Este de Los Angeles, the band were known for scaring gringo audiences with a supercharged version of the mariachi standard "Cielito Lindo" called "Cielito Lindo Huasteco." Just call them the Chicano version of the Pogues. Even the title of their 1978 acoustic Mexi-folk EP, Just Another Band from East LA (re-released by Hollywood in 2000), was a sly allusion to Frank Zappa.

It's the kind of deft integration of influences that served them well when they went from playing Mexican restaurants to opening for John Lydon's Public Image Ltd. in 1980. Indeed, they found their groove -- a bracing blend of maximum R&B and traditional Mexican folk music -- in the same early-'80s LA punk scene that nurtured X, the Plugz, and the Blasters (Blasters saxophonist Steve Berlin joined Los Lobos in 1982). Los Lobos' glorious 1984 album How Will the Wolf Survive (Slash/Warner Bros.) moved easily from shimmering guitar pop ("Will the Wolf Survive") to greasy rockabilly ("Don't Worry Baby") to juiced-up traditional songs worthy of a drunken Tijuana wedding ("Corrida No. 1"). It harnessed the musical tension between Hidalgo's broader, more progressive instincts and fellow guitarist and singer César Rosas's rootsy traditionalism. Best of all, the band's virtuosity proved that you could be great musicians and a great live band without being a bunch of riff wankers. Although it's not often placed in the white-boy 1980s DIY context, How Will the Wolf Survive is a singular document of indie rock, on a short shelf that holds R.E.M.'s Murmur (IRS), the Replacements' Let It Be (Twin Tone), the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (SST), and a few other disparate, definitive post-punk discs.

In the years since, Los Lobos have crafted seven powerful, imaginative albums, the high point being 1992's Kiko (Warner Bros.), a fun-house phantasmagoria of fractured folklore, Miles Davis pastiche, blues, bluegrass, and psychedelia. There have been dead ends and cul de sacs as well. The band's work on the soundtrack for the 1987 Ritchie Valens bio-pic, La Bamba (Warner Bros.), was a blessed curse that almost trapped them in one-hit-wonderland. In the '90s, they logged a lot of time on the H.O.R.D.E. and Furthur tours, patchouli-and-tie-dyed road shows that homogenized most of the artists into jam-band slush.

Then there are the side projects. Hidalgo and Rosas work in the pan-Latin Tex-Mex supergroup Los Super Seven, a loose collective that has included musicians as diverse as Texas songwriter Joe Ely and Peruvian songstress Susanna Baca. And Hidalgo saves his weirdest musical ideas for the Latin Playboys, a noisy, low-fi, everything-but-the kitchen sink project that includes Los Lobos drummer Louie Pérez along with Mitchell Froom and Cibo Matto producer Tchad Blake.

Which brings us to their latest, Good Morning Aztlán (Hollywood), a great hot-weather disc if there ever was one. Opener "Done Gone Blue" and the title track are gruff, bluesy, popabilly rave-ups, with guitars fuzzier than over-ripe Georgia peaches. "The Word" is a languorous soul lament worthy of Marvin Gaye or even Curtis Mayfield; the clarity of the production by John Leckie (XTC, Radiohead) here makes the song's odd transitions and Pérez's tricky percussion seem effortless. On the gorgeous, hypnotic "Round & Round," the instruments, the voices, and the song's simple form seem to quiver like an image seen through hot, humid air. César Rosas weighs in with "María Christina," an experiment with the Colombian song form cumbia that's given the requisite Los Lobos treatment: guitars scrape and shriek amid some marvelously restrained sax work from Berlin.

Sure, their lyrics lean toward naive humanism ("What if we could/Be here like sisters and brothers?" from "The Word"), but that only proves good art can be sincere. The album's overarching æsthetic is one of tasteful restraint -- almost to a fault, but not quite. If there's a politeness about it all, especially on gentle Hidalgo ballads like "Tony y María" or "What in the World," that's probably because the band's more radical and indulgent impulses have their outlets in side projects. Don't worry: they can still blow the roof off of a sock hop with fierce R&B like "Get to This." Dissonance and experimentation have their time. But on a steamy summer day, a little restraint is a good thing.

Issue Date: June 27 - July 4, 2002