‘MOON’ MARKS TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF EAST L.A.’S BEST

Los Lobos’ new “By the Light of the Moon” is a landmark album in Los Angeles rock--the most culturally arresting and musically embracing work by an L.A.-based group in nearly a decade.

Due in stores Monday, the 11-song collection extends the warm-spirited, but socially minded trademarks of the East Los Angeles quintet’s 1984 “How Will the Wolf Survive?” LP to even wider and more personalized terrain.

Not everything on the album is essential. The lively “Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes,” which has been released as a single, adds a touch of bluesy energy and relief to what is frequently a relatively somber look at people isolated from their dreams. But it’s a song that could just as easily fit into the next Stevie Ray Vaughn or Fabulous Thunderbirds collection. It doesn’t push ahead the primary theme of the album.

The key tracks, however, assert an individuality of vision that could only come from this band. Those songs, which comprise the bulk of the album, reflect an eloquence and insight that also characterized the recordings of the two bands since the ‘60s that most powerfully defined the socio-cultural landscape of this town: the very different Eagles and X.

In songs like “Life in the Fast Lane” (1976), the Eagles examined the ways that success corrupts, while X looked with cold-eyed compassion at a post-punk generation trying to define its values in tunes like 1980’s appropriately titled “Los Angeles.”

By contrast, Los Lobos utilizes broader references. In some ways “By the Light of the Moon” has more in common with Bruce Springsteen’s tales about small-town life: the sense of family, community and an uplifting spirit.

At its inspiring core, the album speaks of people who cling to a faith that rejects defeat. However dark their circumstances, most of the characters in the songs exhibit a resilience that keeps them “traveling along a cloudy path / with a wing, a heart and a prayer.”

Because four of the five members of Los Lobos are from East Los Angeles, it is easy to think of these songs as chronicling the plight of that community’s population. Indeed, several lyrics fit easily into the image of barrio life:

Fifteen years on a sewing machine

Where twisted hands don’t mean a thing

Wondering to herself.

Is this all there is.

Similarly, the opening scene from “River of Fools” could describe a group of Mexicans crossing the river into the United States:

Memories of a lonely past

A boat set into the wind

Drifting lost in waters of doubt

On a journey that has no end.

Yet David Hidalgo and Louie Perez, who co-wrote seven of the songs, aren’t limiting themselves to regional stories. They are speaking more generally about the search for the American Dream. Without sacrificing character or intimacy, Hidalgo and Perez describe scenes that could fit into Springsteen’s Freehold, N.J., or John Cougar Mellencamp’s Seymour, Ind.

The group most clearly defines its national scope in the album’s opening song, which was originally titled “One Night in America” but renamed “One Time, One Night” to avoid the jingoistic misinterpretation that surrounded Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”

This tune--which is bolstered by a stinging, guitar-oriented, country beat--sidesteps the sweeping social currents in favor of a glance at the everyday heartbreaks: the gunshot at a neighborhood wedding, a father running off with his children, a young woman trading in her future for the security of joyless marriage.

Yet, life goes on--and the hope remains.

Continues the song:

The sunlight plays upon my windowpane

I wake up to a world that still’s the same.

My father said to be strong

And that a good man could never do wrong.

In a dream I had last night in America.

While other key songs, including the social observation of “The Mess We’re In” and the bittersweet romanticism of “Set Me Free” also look at personal struggles from different angles, the most affecting extensions of the social documentation of “One Time, One Night” comes in the spiritually tinged “River of Fools” and “Tears of God.”

Musically, Los Lobos, again working with producer T-Bone Burnett, has shifted its focus slightly from the casual, anything goes, Saturday night block-party feel of its last album toward the rock mainstream, both in the use of a cleaner studio sound and considered arrangements.

However, this move hasn’t been at the cost of the band’s identity. Los Lobos continues to season its music through the use of such traditional norteno instruments as accordion and bajo sexto, and even salutes the traditional, pre-Tex/Mex wing of norteno music with a song in Spanish.

The album not only answers questions about this band’s art, but also its heart. Already the most celebrated Latino rock artists from Los Angeles since Richie Valens, the group has come through an amazing transformation.

Los Lobos started out in 1974 as an acoustic quartet playing traditional Mexican folk music, but evolved in the late ‘70s to an electric rock outfit.

Encouraged by such local groups as the Blasters, the band--consisting of singer-guitarists Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, bassist Conrad Lozano and drummer Perez--seemed at first to be a novelty on the local scene. Its mix of roots-conscious rock and the flavorful Tex/Mex music made it an especially inviting festive attraction.

But the band, which later added saxophonist Steve Berlin, refused to be pigeon-holed. In “How Will the Wolf Survive?,” Los Lobos earned commercial and critical respect by previewing the substance and depth that is celebrated in this album.

But that was almost three years ago. The question since then has been whether Los Lobos would be corrupted by its own success--and sacrifice its individualism in quest of a more accessible mainstream style.

The triumphant answer in “By the Light of the Moon” is that the wolf has survived. In that way, this album--which is all about faith--is itself a demonstration of faith.