Celebracion: The Warner Brothers Recordings

Album Review

While one has to wonder whether the demand for Malo's product is wide enough to merit a four-CD box set rather than individual reissues of some or all of their albums, Celebracion certainly does a great job of presenting the band's legacy in total. Each of their four 1972-1974 Warner Brothers albums is included in gatefold sleeves, with a 20-page booklet that goes over the band's history with some depth, bolstered by interview quotes from several bandmembers. Two to five bonus tracks are added to each disc/album, though unfortunately these are just shorter single edits of album tracks. There's one previously unreleased cut, "Pana," but that's just an unreleased single edit of the same track of that name that appears on their debut album. Although the albums can be erratic and slightly decline in quality after the debut, Malo, they amply illustrate the band's importance as one of the most exciting outfits to fuse rock with Latin and jazz. Certainly there are similarities with Santana, as might be expected from a band featuring Carlos Santana's brother on guitar. But Malo was more Latin-oriented and sometimes expert at constructing multi-part extended tracks with blistering interplay between hard rock guitar, Latin percussion, and jazz brass. In addition, they could sometimes summon heartfelt, sentimental soul ballads, the hit "Suavecito" being the famous one, though each album has one or two songs in the same vein. They couldn't avoid a certain formulaic quality after a while, and the group drifted toward less-satisfying pop inclinations as time went on and personnel changed, but at its best, this set contains some of the finest Latino rock ever laid down.