For Record Store Day last November, Alejandro Escovedo released a Spanish-language version of his phenomenal 2018 album The Crossing – rechristened La Cruzada – almost instantly selling out every copy of vinyl they pressed.
Escovedo’s label for The Crossing, Yep Roc, has thankfully re-issued the Spanish-language album on all formats. The concept album center on two young immigrants, Diego from Mexico and Salvo from Italy, new to the U.S. bonding over punk rock and film noir while dealing with daily racism and discrimination. Escovedo has decades worth of solo albums brimming with vivid story telling and compelling characters, going back to his impressive debut Gravity in 1992, but The Crossing is probably his most consistently stellar narrative yet thanks to the concept. You’d have to go back to 2002’s By The Hand of The Father, an album of songs based around a play, to find a similar cohesiveness, but La Cruzada is far more enjoyable.
Songs like “Bandido Para Ti,” with Alex Ruiz, of Chingon, on vocals and the rancorous “Equipaje Adolescente” sound even better in Spanish. Patricia Vonne and Vanessa Del Fierro also lend vocals to the record. Like a lot of his music there are strong Americana and roots rock influences throughout, but he also covers a lot of the songs here with punk rock-ish guitar going back to his earliest bands. More so than any of his dozen or so solo efforts, The Crossing and now La Cruzada is his most musically diverse yet, adding in orchestral elements mixed throughout the 17 tracks. The closing number, also serving as the title track is a haunting number, complete with one of the loneliness sax lines in recent memory, and is almost heartbreakingly sad. Commenting on the music, he said recently “This says more about me than any of my records without it being a record about me.”
Much like The Mavericks’s fantastic 2020 album En Español, Escovedo turns in a Spanish-language album you never knew you needed and now you can’t imagine your record collection without it.
