Los Tigres Del Norte - Herencia de Familia (CD)

All Music Guide

Los Tigres del Norte by this point in their career were larger than life. Although they worked very much in the mold of commercial country music most of their songs written by outsiders, shameless TV promotion, lavish packaging the edgy quality of the Tigres' material, and their innovative use of sound effects placed them on a remote summit of folk respectability, other norteña musicians' reputations hopelessly pedestrian in comparison. They are, to Mexican music what Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson are to American music, although the analogy is not perfect, first, because the Tigres are very much a band, and second, because the Tigres have always sounded the way they sound, and have not really deviated from their formula. Imagine Johnny Cash's Sun output merging seamlessly into the American recordings and you will get an idea of the Tigres' legacy. This is not to say that they don't experiment. On Herencia de la Familia they even include a song in English (it's terrible) and one in "s...panglish" (possibly a sort of gesture to their growing gringo audience). On earlier records, the Tigres had dabbled in rock, and actually throughout the 90's and the millennium, had endowed each new release with a kind of epic grandeur, reminiscent of how rock music is packaged and programmed. Herencia de la Familia is typical of this string of releases. It's a doubleCD package (although it's actual contents could fit on a single disc with room to spare the commercial standard in Mexico is 30 minutes per CD). It's initial brief soliloquy and tiger roar are followed by an ode to political cynicism. The next song is a radiofriendly romantic ballad with a catchy accordion hook and a soft rock drum beat. A couple of songs later, they are begging Jesus to come and end what surely must be tribulation, then lurching into an uproarious and hilariously facile tribute to Las Vegas. The second disk starts at the same energy level as the first, then gradually peters out until we are left with a blatantly filler version of Alla in el Rancho Grande. Read more Less