Nuestro Primer Disco / Nuestro Amor

In the spirit of Charlie Zaa's successful retro-Latin packages, this group offers a flashback to the days of the romantic trios of the '50s and '60s: Los Dandys, Los Panchos, etc. The songs are grouped into (ostensibly) thematic medleys — e.g. "Adoration" or "Obsession." It's hard to see subtle shades of lyrical meaning that would make any of the given medley categories more or less appropriate for any of the songs — not that one can make much of an argument for subtle differences between the categories themselves. But all that silliness is beside the point. Los Tri-O's music is elegantly crafted, and incredibly difficult to sing and play, and was far less lyrically vacuous then the English romantic lyrics of the day (due in large part to its inherent Mexican fatalism). There is some great singing and playing on this record, and it's hard not to get goose bumps sometimes as the Tri-O resurrect one chestnut after another from the golden age. That said, they also want to make the case that these are not your mom's boleros. There is a conspicuous bottom end to everything here that would have gone missing from both the instrumentation and recording techniques of the original trios, as well as the obligatory modern digital cleanliness which tends, unfortunately, to make the proceedings feel sterile. To their credit, the Tri-O still manage to deliver professional, evocative, and occasionally moving performances amid the gloss. This was their breakout disc, and it's easy to see how their slick update of vintage pop was a calculated bridge over the Latin generation gap (narrow as that gap is), winning over young and old alike. It's harder to justify why a collector would value this disc over the almost uniformly sublime original recordings in this genre. ~ J. Chandler, Rovi