Dose

Dose

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com's Best of 99
With their other band Los Lobos, David Hidalgo and Louie Perez helped generate a Latin rock & roll sound specific to East Los Angeles. With Latin Playboys, Hidalgo and Perez--joined by studio maestros Tchad Blake and Mitch Froom--are quickly yanking even the wildest Los Lobos material into an altogether more dynamic, complex realm. Hissing, crackling, lo-fi sonic buzzing--it's all part of Dose, which ranks squarely with the best of 1999 precisely because it stretches in so many directions without losing its heart. --Andrew Bartlett

Amazon.com
The follow-up to the Latin Playboys' 1994 cult-fave debut finds the union of Los Lobos bandmates David Hidalgo and Louie Perez and the studio team of Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake pushing their envelope-busting, genre-blending mix of ethnic, urban, rock, jazz, and audio vérité across every boundary they can imagine and into a musical place that seems to lie just south of the eighth dimension. It's a journey down Whittier Boulevard by way of the rings of Saturn. Dose's slice-of-life lyrics come alive in brave new music whose rhythm tracks are as likely to be a chorus of bicycle bells recorded in an Indian street as standard drums. The opening instrumental, "Fiesta Exotica," sets the tone, recalling the dense, alien rush of Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced. Indeed, Dose echoes the most underrated aspect of '60s rock: its utopian sense of endless possibilities and the adventuresome spirit to pursue them. Each track seems to be a short story with a soundtrack that manages to be simultaneously familiar ("Lemon & Ice"'s cool, loping R&B; the Curtis Mayfield-esque falsetto of "Locoman"; the distorted-blues shuffle of "Tormento Blvd.") and otherworldly. Listened to in tandem with Hidalgo's other contemporary side project, Houndog (a minimalist blues excursion with vocalist Mike Halby), Dose supports producer T Bone Burnett's contention that Hidalgo is one of the greatest musicians of his generation. As far as making the perfect video for this music, Orson Welles may well have beaten the Playboys to the punch; he called his Touch of Evil. --Jerry McCulley

Dose