Logos cover

Logos

Released

This breakthrough LP by Chicago Latin-psych band Dos Santos is oddly underappreciated, in part because of its unusual place in the catalogue of International Anthem — it’s a comparatively straightforward kind of rock-adjacent record for a label more associated with the region’s avant-jazz scene. But it’s a big community, and there’s plenty of room for an improv-conversant group like this that’s capable of such a potent mixture of cumbia, acid rock, brown-eyed soul, funk, and the occasional foray into Afrobeat (check out Antibalas’s horn section on the title cut). Logos sounds like a sprawling, diasporic dissertation on what “Latin music” is able to be, with so many routes that stretch from tradition to hybridization and reinvention (“Córdva” as doom salsa; the winking “El Condor Pasa” feint/reclamation in “Purísima”) that by the time the soaring sweep of closer “(You Are) My Revolution” hits, it’s easy to hear the fearlessness in Alex Chavez’s voice, clear as day.

Nate Patrin

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