Los Lobos recorded a bunch of Mexican folk songs for their 1978 debut LP, titling the collection Just Another Band From East LA. During the ensuing third of a century, singer/guitarists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, drummer/guitarist Louie Perez and bassist Conrad Lozano – joined in the early ’80s by Philadelphia-born sax player and producer Steve Berlin – have put the lie to that description, cementing their status as one of America’s most reliably adventurous bands.

This is a band who have traditionally marched to a beat that’s entirely their own: a seamless amalgam of rock’n’roll, blues, R’n’B, country and Tex-Mex, all topped with Hidalgo’s achingly soulful vocals. When they scored a big hit with the theme to the Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba, the band followed it up with an album of traditional Mexican music. For this 14th album the band respond to new circumstances – as Steve Berlin puts it, “new label, strange times” – in a similarly powerful way. Los Lobos’ baseline is so high, when they surpass it, as they do here, their music is as good as it gets, period.

For Tin Can Trust, the band holed up in a funky studio in an East LA neighbourhood not far from where the four core bandmembers grew up, and built the album from scratch, having arrived without any completed songs or any particular course to pursue. Despite the lack of direction going in, the resulting LP is as sonically coherent and thematically unified as anything they’re done.

Reliably enthralling writers, Hidalgo and Perez have the ability to transport their band into the mystic, as they do here on “The Lady Of The Rose”, a magical-realist narrative about a visitation from the Virgin Mary. The metaphysical blues nocturne “Jupiter Or The Moon”, and the closing “27 Spanishes”, a fabulist take on the conquistadors’ invasion of what is now Mexico, perform similar high-quality work. The latter has an audacious kiss-off line: “Later they became muy friendly/and their blood was often mixed/Now they all hang out together/and play guitars for kicks”.

These are the album’s most atmospheric moments, along with the loping cityscape “On Main Street”. But the partners can also raise the temperature to Mojave levels, channeling a lifetime of desperation and defiance into the molten opener, “Burn It Down”, pushed along by the thick plunks of Lozano’s fingers on a stand-up bass. Susan Tedeschi’s harmony vocal echoes Hidalgo’s innate soulfulness – the track concludes with his guitar pyrotechnics. The title track, meanwhile, is built on a Perez lyric of resilience in the face of a world seemingly without hope, and the band gets to its pumping heart.

Rosas contributed a pair of originals en Español, and collaborated with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter on the minor-key lament “All My Bridges Burning”. Interestingly, the language of this seasoned writer, though thematically on-point, lacks both the colour and the lived-in credibility of Perez’s lyrics – but it’s saved by yet another breathtaking Hidalgo solo. Indeed, whatever else it is, Tin Can Trust is a kick-ass guitar record showcasing Hidalgo’s ability to fuse his virtuosity with the emotion at the core of each song.

Now in their mid-fifties, Los Lobos aren’t remotely close to losing their edge, in stark contrast to many of their tapped-out fellow veterans. Tin Can Trust is a masterful album from an undeniably great American band, at the peak of its considerable powers.

Bud Scoppa

What is the character of this record?

We’ve never really had any concept, with the exception of Pistola… [1988] and The Ride [2004], where we paid tribute to the artists who inspired us and played with them. In a weird way, this record is paying tribute to the music we grew up with. It was evocative to be back in East LA after 30 years. We weren’t trying to go retro, but it inevitably fell that way by virtue of where we were and because the songs were put together on the spot.

This is also a killer guitar album that shows what an underrated player Hidalgo is.

It’s not like we set out to change that mindset, but as the record unfolded, we realised he’d played some really tasty solos. On “Tin Can Trust”, as Dave was doing the vocal, he had his guitar in his hands, like a security blanket, and on one of those takes he let that solo rip. There were no mics in front of the guitar and the amp was across the room, so the sound of that solo is through his vocal mic. But it doesn’t get any better than that, so we had to use it.

How does Tin Can Trust stack up against the previous 13 LPs?

There was a lot more uncertainty going into this record – new label, strange times – and the fact that we came out with a really good record that really sounds like us, that’s what I’ll be taking away from this one. INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

It was customary for British bands in the late 1960s to have the blues – but it was only the Groundhogs who really battled them. Having started life in the early 1960s as a dues-paying, John Lee Hooker backing four, by the mid-1970s, they had become a trio who supported The Rolling Stones, had three Top 10 albums – only to develop a baroque quasi-funk, just in time for punk. Just as they finally won the battle, the war, so to speak, moved elsewhere.

Thank Christ For The Groundhogs is a three-CD set that recounts the highpoints of their campaign. Since the demise of the definitive power trio – bass player Pete Cruikshank, drummer Ken Pustelnik, and guitarist Tony McPhee – in the mid 1970s, the band has enjoyed a double life. Their terrestrial selves play on the pub circuit. Their records, however, enjoy a glowing reputation among the likes of Julian Cope, Comets On Fire, Steve Malkmus, and Mark E Smith – inspired, one would think, by the band’s schizophrenia, their unspooling riffs, and laconic reportage.

Essentially, the Groundhogs made music for generations of freaks, without being particularly freaky themselves. Based around the blues-derived playing of Tony McPhee, (never a drug-taker; his hobbies included mending electronic equipment), theirs was music that, if anything made a virtue out of this British reserve. Not just great musicians, the Groundhogs were also acute songwriters: and having sketched images of war, class obedience, suburban life, the band’s torrential playing was ripe to break free from them.

Still, listening to the band’s first two albums, the Mike Batt-produced Scratching The Surface (recorded in a single afternoon in 1968) and the fractionally more deranged Blues Obituary (1969), only a staunch believer would have predicted the stylistic leap that the band were shortly going to make. An outfit from the same blues scene that gave rise to Clapton and the Yardbirds, they were undoubtedly authentic, but sound, retrospectively hugely constrained. Maybe they had the blues. But at this point, it sounded more like the blues had them.

For Thank Christ For The Bomb (1970) and Split (1971), however, something great happened, and it becomes helpful to think of the Groundhogs as a hybrid of The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. Like the latter, they were fans of American R’n’B, who had moved on, lessons learned. Like the former, they had made their escape by mining their own cultural identity. Thank Christ…is in part a British Tommy’s psych album, part a tour of English “types”. Half of Split, another concept, is an account of a psychedelic experience during an Indian meal.

It’s what the band make of McPhee’s songs, (like “Strange Town”, later covered by The Fall or the inspirational “Split Part 2”) that show what the Groundhogs were all about. To hear them in such moments is to hear musicians in full exploratory flight, McPhee’s guitar playing and Pustelnik’s free-roaming drumming setting them on the same paths as Cream, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Having scaled such heights, it’s perhaps no wonder that the band’s next album Who Will Save The World – The Mighty Groundhogs, should see them assuming mythical powers. Certainly, inside, they attempt the impossible: from Mellotron Skiffle (“Earth Is Not Room Enough”) to Cartesian Indie (“Body In Mind”), and mostly pull them off. The album was another Top 10 success, but was the last to feature the original lineup.

It’s a shame that the Groundhogs don’t enjoy a more revered position. Instead, they join noble company: underdogs, perhaps, but still capable of truly magnificent days.

John Robinson

Your sound changed a lot, didn’t it?

Scratching The Surface was nearly all derived blues, changed a bit. For Blues Obituary… the blues had its second popular time, and we realised it was going out again. I wanted the songs to be listenable later on…

The original trio was very powerful…

We definitely loved improvising. Whoever was having a good night we’d call on them, “Right, it’s your turn…” But what used to happen was I would go off at a tangent, and wouldn’t be able to find my way back. Ken [Pustelnik] would do this weird drumming, which is what he does, and Pete was playing harmonic basslines. I got rid of Ken initially, because he annoyed me intensely. We tried in 2004, to get back together, but he pissed me off again. I said to Pete, ‘I can’t do this any more.’ I left him a message and went down the pub.

You’ve got some interesting fans…

I didn’t realise that a lot of punks were well into The Groundhogs. Captain Sensible is one of our staunchest fans, and Mark E Smith is a big fan too. It’s very weird.

INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON