Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Movie Review

Los Lobos offer up one of their most acclaimed albums in a live performance.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 4, 2012

Do you ever feel you were born in the wrong country or even the wrong continent? I hail from the American west and northwest, but I have been inordinately drawn to Latin music of all sorts since I was a very small kid. While my major obsession has always been the beautiful music of Brazil, especially the seductive, langorous Bossa Nova, I have a soft spot in my heart for all sorts of other styles which sometimes touch frankly fairly tangentially on the Latin idiom. Los Lobos is a band that at once celebrates their Hispanic heritage while at the same time not being slaves to it, but their interesting combination of traditions has always appealed to my "Latin music loving" heart. The band has carved out its own very unique blend of Chicano rock, rockabilly, rhythm and blues and just good old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll for several decades now, racking up an impressive list of chart hits and several Grammy Awards. The fact that the band itself moved through a wide variety of genres as it refined its own identity is testament to the hugely disparate influences Los Lobos brings to its songcraft and performances. And it’s notable (no pun intended) to see just how far the band had come from its first really overwhelming mainstream chart success, its cover of Richie Valens’ iconic “La Bamba” in 1987, to the much more freewheeling and multidisciplinary Kiko album in 1992, a relatively short span of five years. Though Kiko didn’t exactly burn up the charts at the time of its release, it’s come to be appreciated as one of the finest albums in Los Lobos’ remarkable oeuvre, an album that combines all sorts of unexpected influences while at the same time remaining remarkably consistent and cohesive. Los Lobos Kiko Live is a very engaging combination of a live performance of the album in February of 2006 at the House of Blues in San Diego along with some equally engaging and even illuminating interview segments with various band members.

Though it’s possible to view Kiko Live with just the concert footage (more or less, anyway—see the Supplements section below for more details), some of the most interesting content here is actually in the little “confessional” interviews with the various band members that crop up in between every two or three songs. While some of these sequences deal with the inspiration for whatever song is coming next, there’s also a lot of really nice background given on the band and its formation and evolution through the years. This is a band that has been together in one shape or form since many of the members were in high school in Los Angeles, and that lifelong camaraderie is what gives Los Lobos’ music its special and very distinctive spark.

One of the funny things that comes out in the interview segments is that the band rarely rehearses and that going back to the songs that make up Kiko was a (re)learning experience, especially since several of the songs haven’t matriculated into the band’s regular touring or performance repertoire. There’s some fun footage of the band setting up shop in a living room of one of the members and trying to remember just how certain songs go again.

There’s a bit of band history interwoven in several anecdotes as well, even those that deal more ostensibly with how a certain song came to be written. While we get a nice mini-tour of Garfield High (at least from the outside), where several of the guys met each other in tenth grade, there’s some fascinating tidbits revealed surrounding the creation of “Angels With Dirty Faces”, the band’s ode to the homeless. It turns out they were creating demos in an area of Los Angeles that they term “almost like a third world nation” in terms of how many street people there were, even whole families living in cardboard boxes, and seeing those sad folks on the way to and from the recording sessions inspired the song.

In terms of the music part of this program, the band is in mostly great shape vocally and instrumentally, with only a few ragged edges showing from time to time. What’s so fun about this album is how wonderfully inventive it is. One song will have a Mellotron and squeeze box and the next will have a harp and Andes pan flute feel. Through it all, Los Lobos rocks with energy but a very relaxed feel, and they are able to evoke their heritage without sounding like a third rate Xerox copy of it. The final song brings on what looks like a bunch of younger or even student players to accompany the band, and it’s great to see tradition being passed on to a new generation.

The actual concert of Kiko Live: February 24, 2006 consists of the following songs:

• 01. Dream In Blue
• 02. Wake Up Dolores
• 03. Angels With Dirty Faces
• 04. That Train Don't Stop Here
• 05. Kiko and the Lavender Moon
• 06. Saint Behind The Glass
• 07. Reva's House
• 08. When the Circus Comes
• 09. Arizona Skies
• 10. Short Side of Nothing
• 11. Two Janes
• 12. Wicked Rain
• 13. Whiskey Trail
• 14. Just a Man
• 15. Peace
• 16. Rio de Tenampa

Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Los Lobos Kiko Live: Feburary 24, 2006 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This high definition presentation has several elegantly crisp moments, but it's also hampered by a somewhat soft looking image, especially (and rather strangely) in some of the interview segments, which don't quite pop with the level of fine object detail one would expect them to. The concert footage looks really quite good most of the time, though the lighting scheme features several specialty lights beaming hues straight down, often in deep blue, which creates posterizing effects on both the upstage area as well as the players' heads and hair. There is also very slight banding noticeable when the lights change. Generally, though, this is a nicely sharp and well detailed offering that should please the band's many fans.

Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Los Lobos Kiko Live: Feburary 24, 2006 features two fantastic sounding lossless tracks, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix (96kHz, 24-bit) and an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down. The music is of course the standout feature on this soundtrack, and the 5.1 mix especially offers it up with sterling fidelity and very nice spaciousness. There's really not much crowd noise to speak of here (which is fine by me), but when it does show up it's resolutely anchored in the rear channels as it should be. There is good discrete channelization placement of individual instruments with vocals spread across the front three channels. The interview segments aren't especially impressive from a surround standpoint (as should be expected), but overall this is an impressively immersive track that offers fantastic reproduction across all frequency ranges and which presents the live concert footage with impeccable audio.

Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Concert Only removes the confessional interview segments and just presents the February 2006 concert footage. The two versions (Concert and Film) were evidently done via seamless branching, which in this case is not perfectly seamless. In the Concert Version, sometimes just a snippet of an interview segment will start before the disc skips to the next song.


• Encore (HD; 13:44) includes performances of Carabina 30-30, Volver, Volver and La Bamba. This is authored rather weirdly, again with seamless branching seemingly cutting out the additional "vignettes" (interview segments—see next entry).


• Bonus Vignettes (HD; 12:43) features little interview segments called Hi-Fi Low-Fi, The Story of La Bamba and The Music Reveals Itself.

Los Lobos: Kiko Live Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In one of the interview segments on Los Lobos Kiko Live: Feburary 24, 2006, the band talks about how they pretty much set their own schedule and tempo for recording, and have never felt beholden to any outside force to do things other than the way they want to do them. That might account for the almost haphazard set of releases the band has offered through the years. This is obviously a band not incredibly intent on burning up the charts every couple of months with a zingy new single. That also means that Los Lobos offers a rare degree of sincerity and integrity in the often cutthroat world of corporate rock. The fact that so many of these guys have played together since they were teens makes the group unusually cohesive and insular, without being "isolationist", so to speak; they obviously have a strong rapport not just with each other, but with their audience. This is a really interesting documentary that offers some very compelling "confessional" anecdotes mixed in with a great live reading of one of their most acclaimed albums. With solid (if occasionally problematic) video and fantastic audio, this release comes Highly recommended.