Logos

This breakthrough LP by Chicago Latin-psych band Dos Santos is oddly underappreciated, in part because of its unusual place in the catalogue of International Anthem — it’s a comparatively straightforward kind of rock-adjacent record for a label more associated with the region’s avant-jazz scene. But it’s a big community, and there’s plenty of room for an improv-conversant group like this that’s capable of such a potent mixture of cumbia, acid rock, brown-eyed soul, funk, and the occasional foray into Afrobeat (check out Antibalas’s horn section on the title cut). Logos sounds like a sprawling, diasporic dissertation on what “Latin music” is able to be, with so many routes that stretch from tradition to hybridization and reinvention (“Córdva” as doom salsa; the winking “El Condor Pasa” feint/reclamation in “Purísima”) that by the time the soaring sweep of closer “(You Are) My Revolution” hits, it’s easy to hear the fearlessness in Alex Chavez’s voice, clear as day.