LOS LOBOS

Los Lobos continue their double life on “Tin Can Trust.” Onstage (as at Bowery Ballroom, where they are to perform Tuesday) Los Lobos are a good-natured, multicultural jam band with roots in the blues, early rock ’n’ roll, Mexican norteño music and California folk-rock. Yet in the studio those same roots serve the band’s increasing introspection: a sense of weariness without resignation, tenacity toward no sure goal, and perennially unfulfilled longing. It’s steeped in the blues but distinct from it: less angry or humorous, more pensive and unresolved.
On their haunting 2006 album, “The Town and the City,” Los Lobos connected that mood to the journeys of immigrants and restless travelers. Despite the four-year gap between albums of new Los Lobos songs, “Tin Can Trust” comes across as a strong sequel.
The wanderings continue on “Tin Can Trust,” though now they are more allegorical than geographic. The album opens with “Burn It Down” by Los Lobos’s main songwriting team: its singer and player of anything with strings, David Hidalgo, and its drummer, Louie Pérez. In a Celtic-tinged modal tune with fiddle and Conrad Lozano’s upright bass, Mr. Hidalgo sings, “The time had come for me to run away,” and adds, “Once I go there is no coming back.” Later a distorted electric-guitar tremolo sweeps through like a conflagration.
Cesar Rosas, the band’s other guitarist and songwriter, and its raspier lead singer, also sees flames and farewells in the mournful “All My Bridges Burning,” written with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Another voyage is summed up in the Hidaldo-Pérez song “21 Spanishes,” a bluesy reimagining of the Spanish arrival in the Americas and its aftermath: “Their blood was often mixed/Now they all hang out together, and play guitar for kicks.”
For most of the album, tempos are slow and deliberate, with only a few upbeat diversions; minor chords predominate. “Jupiter or the Moon” is aching and bereft, as Mr. Hidalgo sings, “Where did you go, go so soon?” In “Tin Can Trust,” he’s in love but utterly destitute.
The album’s closely huddled sound, produced by the band, can be as telling as the songs. Los Lobos made “Tin Can Trust” in a small studio in East Los Angeles, the part of the city where the band got started in 1973. Instruments are heard seemingly unadorned; a door creaks, voices drift in. It’s an album about facing limitations, drawing what hope there is from seeing each situation clearly. JON PARELES
SEU JORGE AND ALMAZ
(Stones Throw)
I didn’t like this at first. The baritone singer Seu Jorge is the rare Brazilian musician with an international audience willing to go more than halfway to meet him. He may have found that audience more through his movie roles in “City of God” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” but his music has gotten direct, smart, intuitive about differences in taste between generations and cultures; his brand of cool leaps over most barriers, and won’t lose currency quickly. As a singer he’s a charismatic natural, and he could become great. By a certain way of thinking, he shouldn’t be messing around right now.
In Almaz, a new band, he’s messing around. He’s collaborating with the drummer Pupillo and the guitarist Lucio Maia, two of the key members of Nação Zumbi, from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, who, at the top of their game, make some of the best music in the world: deeply rhythmic, tough and smoky collisions of rock and surf and reggae and samba. “Seu Jorge and Almaz” is an album of covers of Brazilian, American and European music from the ’70s: floppy and spacey, a bit like a demo, charming and terribly hip, close to what you might imagine as the intersection of Seu Jorge and Nação Zumbi at the bottom of their respective games.
There’s “The Model,” by Kraftwerk, redone as deep-space reggae; “Girl You Move Me,” by the obscure, early ’70s French funk band Cane and Able; a maximally chilled-out, woolgathering version of Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” (It’s produced by Mario Caldato, Jr., who’s worked with the Beastie Boys in the past, as well as Seu Jorge and Nação Zumbi individually.) Is this what we want to see some of the most exciting musicians in the world doing? Crate-digging with deep echo? Slouching through stoner jams?
I’m still not convinced, but I got happier by the third listen. This is a slight record, but a good one. It’s not using obscurity as a cudgel. (It includes a remake of Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You.”) It’s pretty blissful music, stubborn in its antiprofessionalism, soulful in its garage-iness. It makes strong and simple rearrangements of formerly lush songs. It’s not trying too hard, and then suddenly it is: in “Cristina,” Seu Jorge hollers the refrain as loud as his voice will go, channeling his source, the singer Tim Maia; in Jorge Ben’s “Errare Humanum Est,” the whole performance, with thick crusts of surf guitar and shuffling drums, takes on a mysterious strength, a trancelike shimmer. BEN RATLIFF
DR. JOHN
and the Lower 911
“Tribal” (429)
The time is ripe for a really good new album from Dr. John. Over the last few months HBO broadcast the first season of “Treme,” a series about the resilient quirks of New Orleans musical culture, Dr. John’s lifelong milieu, in the months after Hurricane Katrina. (Like many of his peers he appeared on the show as himself.) The last few months have also seen the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and its repercussions. Given his role as a grizzled voice of conscience — he already had a recent song called “Black Gold,” written with Bobby Charles — it feels right to be hearing from him now.
But “Tribal” isn’t a chronicle of tragedy, like his 2005 album “Sippiana Hericane” (Blue Note), nor an admonitory broadside, like his 2008 release “City That Care Forgot” (429). Instead it’s a celebration of local customs and universal concerns, more imploring than indignant. The opener, “Feel Good Music,” lays out his agenda, with an air of voodoo enchantment.
At 69, Dr. John sounds much the same as in his wily youth, singing in a drawling croak and playing piano and organ with a principal stake in rhythm. On “Tribal” he digs hard into the New Orleans rhythm and blues on which he cut his teeth. His sinewy band, the Lower 911, which will join him on Monday and Tuesday at City Winery, manages to riff on a classic sound without ever going retro.
Much the same could be said of Dr. John himself. “Change of Heart,” “When I’m Right (I’m Wrong)” and “Jinky Jinx,” which appear here in that order, might have come from almost any period in his career. (That’s not a complaint.) Another tune, “Potnah,” fits that description just as well, maybe better. So too “Manoovas,” which features a guest turn by the guitarist Derek Trucks. (Just pretend he’s Duane Allman.)
The beating heart of “Tribal,” though, is a scattering of songs about struggle, like “Lissen at Our Prayer,” a slow-simmering environmental plea; “Big Gap,” about income inequality; and “Only in America,” a lamentation incanted over an Afro-Cuban groove. Dr. John isn’t interested in any blame game here; “Them” skewers the very idea of finger-pointing.
What counts — as he suggests with “Music Came,” featuring his bassist, David Barard, on lead vocals and Donald Harrison Jr. on alto saxophone — is the redemptive power of art, something in which trust can be placed.