With an album this great, it’s tempting to say, there are two types of people in the world: those who know they must have this upgraded anniversary edition of Kiko and those whose response to the title track is, “Who and the lavender what?” Or that you either love Kiko or you’ve never heard it. To those familiar with Los Lobos’ landmark 1992 release, owning this new version is not even a decision, but a reflexive action.
To mark the 20th anniversary, Shout Factory has released a new, remastered CD edition of Kiko that augments the album’s original 16 tracks with five demos (a new process for the band, starting with this album) and live performances from 1993 of two of Kiko’s songs. The remastering takes a gorgeous-sounding album and exposes all the depth of the mix and dynamics of the broad range of instruments and sounds used on it, turning it into the kind you use to demo a set of high-end speakers. If you’re familiar with the “brick walling” that makes so much of today’s music sound overly loud and exhausting to listen to, this is the opposite of that.
While it might be a stretch (if not irreverent) to compare this album with an immaculate conception, at the time of its original release, Kiko was nearly as substantial a surprise as Mary and Joseph’s little bundle of joy.
Well-received initial albums, respectable sales, and a Grammy award were a prelude to Los Lobos’ breakout hit, “La Bamba,” in 1987. In typical rock and roll fashion, having a number one single wound up being a mixed blessing. The band then pulled a Nebraska—taking a surprisingly non-commercial turn—with an exceptional set of traditional Mexican songs, La Pistola y el Corazón, a commercial disappointment which, nonetheless, earned them another Grammy.
Their subsequent album, 1990’s The Neighborhood, was a substantial next step in their natural musical progression which had the misfortune of following a massive hit that sounded very little like anything else on the album. According to Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin, the process of The Neighborhood was “not that pleasant.” They then spent great sums of money mounting a year-long tour behind the album, and returned home, exhausted and broke.
While far from desperate then, the band’s circumstances were equally far from ideal. They undoubtedly could have cashed in by grinding out oldies as “The La Bamba Band,” as the Lobos’ Louie Pérez called them; there must have been some temptation to become the world’s preeminent Richie Valens tribute band.
Despite their progression as songwriters and polished performers through the course of their previous four albums, followers of the band couldn’t have been prepared for the radical departure from The Neighborhood (or anything else Los Lobos had done) that Kiko represented. Not unlike the transformation the Talking Heads accomplished in the transition from the spiky, stripped-down sound of More Songs About Buildings and Food, to the experimental songwriting and post-psychedelic soundscapes of Fear of Music and Remain in Light, Los Lobos undertook a dramatic, if unplanned evolution between the two albums.
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