Alejandro Escovedo’s ‘Street Songs of Love’

Recorded with Escovedo’s four-piece road band, the album is heavy on big guitars and big choruses. His lyrics strive for grand, universal statements about the most universal, if also most elusive, emotion. They teeter between flashes of the poetic and the generic, sometimes within the same song. These songs don’t call for insight; they demand boldness.

What makes it work is the sheer exuberance of the performances, the roar coming from the speakers. This is an album about the heart, but it hits below the belt — it wants to make you move. Escovedo and the band throw themselves into the melodies, and Visconti nails the details: the hand claps in “This Bed Is Getting Crowded,” the visceral impact of the booming backbeats and subterranean bass on “Tender Heart,” the way Escovedo shouts, “C’mon, fool me!” before the guitar solo in “Silver Cloud.”

After all the bravado, the instrumental “Fort Worth Blue” brings it all home with a lovely, melancholy shimmer. Coming after understated cameos by Springsteen and Hunter, “Fort Worth Blue” puts the focus back where it should be: on a road-tested band that kicks out the jams and then closes down the bar.

By Greg Kot – Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-albumreviews-20100629,0,2437.story?page=2