As a general rule, Los Lobos aren’t given to flights of fancy. Their music is traditionally very down to earth, detailing working class struggles, relationship struggles, and the joy of rising above. If you want to look for anything remotely fantastical in their music, you have to search long and hard, and chances are you won’t use up all your fingers counting. “One Time, One Night” includes the lines “A quiet voice is singing something to me / An age-old song about the home of the brave”. “River of Fools” envisions “A trio of angels holding candles of light / Guide the ship to an unknown shore / Sad soul riders with arms drawn tight / As they stopped for just one more”. “Colossal Head” begins by borrowing from Little Red Riding Hood: “What big eyes you have / What big lips you have”.
That’s pretty much it, and apart from those lines, the songs don’t really deviate from the Los Lobos real-world template. There’s one album, though, that takes on a glimmer of nighttime and wonder: 1992’s Kiko. Kiko is at once a typical Los Lobos album — full of hard-luck tales and hopes for a better future — but it’s also the only Los Lobos album that might be a little “touched” (as some of our grandmothers might have put it). On this one album, Los Lobos allow more wonder into their lyrics than in the rest of their albums combined. “Dream in Blue” recalls, “I flew around with shiny things / And when I spoke, I seemed to sing”. “Wake Up Dolores” intones “Oh sacred night / On Quetzal plumes / Of dying suns / And purple moons”. Ont he darker side, “Angels with Dirty Faces” looks at a world with a “broken window smile” and “weeds for hair”, while “Short Side of Nothing” imagines “Crows up on the rooftop / Laughing out my name.”
Admittedly, it might be a stretch to look for flashes of magic in Los Lobos’s music. Maybe they were just feeling a little bit more poetic than usual. Then again, there’s the album’s title track and centerpiece, so unlike anything the band have recorded before or since. “Kiko and the Lavender Moon”, drifting in on a bed of jazzy lounge music that Little Nemo would have killed for, tells the tale (as best I can tell) about a boy who plays and bends and shakes, and when he “flies up to the wall / Stands on one foot / Doesn’t even fall”, it’s hard to know if he’s awake or dreaming. The whole song could be a dream, and a large part of its charm is that it glides along on that dreamlike ambiguity. Or Kiko could be some fey night child, more at home with black cats than with the people he seems to avoid by sleeping all day — if you really want to stretch your interpretation of the song.
The point is: there’s a spirit to Kiko that’s shared by no other Los Lobos album. It captures a unique moment in time for the band. While it’s still a Los Lobos album with the usual real-world concerns (“Angels with Dirty Faces”, for example, is informed by the harsh conditions outside the studio.”Two Janes” is about suicide. “Just a Man” is one long cry of regret.), it’s also the closest Los Lobos ever came to magical realism, and it might help explain why the album still stands so tall today on its 20th anniversary. From: https://www.popmatters.com/162070-los-loboskiko-live-2495824798.html
