Given all the extracurricular projects members of Los Lobos pursued during the three years separating Colossal Head and its followup, it's not surprising that they've decided to show off what they've learned on This Time, resulting in a record that vacillates between songcraft and sonic sculptures. It could be said that Kiko and Colassal Head were like this as well, but the difference is that This Time has the structure of a straight-ahead rock & roll record, clocking in at 38 minutes with 11 short tracks. While that conciseness is welcome, it also points out the flaws in the post-Latin Playboys Los Lobos – Cesar Rosas' fine rockers are obscured by a layer of studio gauze, and David Hidalgo's songs can seem like excuses to run wild in the studio…
This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.
We are not in the times of 100 Club Oxford Street, The Nashville, Hope and Anchor … when a multitude of young people tried to escape from the musical prison that prevailed in England in the mid-70s, where rock stadium and virtuosity They made up the bars for a bunch of low-class misfits who just wanted to get out of the routine between paints.