Consumer Guide Album

Joe "King" Carrasco & the Crowns: Bordertown [Big Beat, 1984]
Problem with King's pared-down Tex-Mex party-up has always been that it leaves him nowhere to go--got away with baroque jokes for an elpee, but when he tried to pop it up he schlocked it up. Yet now he comes bursting out of his dead end with his spunkiest music ever, and the secret--I didn't believe it either--is politics. "Who Buy the Guns?" ("That kill the nuns yea yeah") and "Cucaracha Taco" ("When they drop el bomb on everyone") are only the most successful experiments on an album that manages to be silly/cautionary and harmless/seditious as well as hedonistic/humanistic and stoopid/smart. A−