“Let’s make that magic happen one more time,” goes the chorus of this album’s second-best song. That’s a good prescription for the Iguanas, who’ve been decidedly low-key for the past few years.
Unless you count 2012s Sin to Sin—a half-hour long album whose best song was a cover and which probably should have been called an EP—they haven’t done a full album since If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times six years ago. When I’ve seen the band in recent years, they’ve done a lot of seesawing between styles—including a flirtation with jazz when they briefly added a trumpet player—but the roadhouse magic of their early years seemed to be in shorter supply.
But don’t bury them, because they ain’t dead yet. Recorded with Mark Bingham at the now-defunct Piety Street, Juarez is very much a back-to-base album, largely returning to their original “garage Latin” concept; it may be the most rocking, straight-ahead album they’ve ever done.
The opener and advance single “Love, Sucker” (whose title is the complete lyric) tells the story: When an album starts with a Jr. Walker-styled frat-house rocker, with plenty of wailing sax by Joe Cabral, it’s a tip-off that they’re serious about not getting too serious. Also back is the Tex-Mex flavor of the early days, “Matamoros Way” and “Problems With You” both sound like overdue tributes to one of the band’s first inspirations, Doug “Sir Douglas” Sahm.
Classic New Orleans R&B also gets a nod on “Make that Magic Happen,” which suggests, with some justification, that a fading romance can be rekindled if Johnny Adams is on the stereo. (There’s a bit of post-Katrina subtext here too, but more upbeat than it might once have been.) The real standout, though, is “Soul Kiss,” which lands squarely on the garage-rock side of the equation.
Unfortunately, they’re still prone to eccentric pieces like “Wedding of Chicken and Snake” on which a Spanish narration, seemingly recorded by telephone, messes with a perfectly good instrumental groove. That’s the exception though; there’s at least a half-dozen songs here that can join “Boom Boom Boom” and “Oye Isabel” on the Iguanas’ list of surefire crowd pleasers.
