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| Popmatters |
 Raul Malo has a big voice, the kind that gets him compared to Roy Orbison and opera singers. His clear tenor instrument has won him many admirers, especially the distaff kind. I caught him perform at one show in Austin where the late Governor Ann Richards, model Jerry Hall, and singer Rachel Fuller all squealed like schoolgirls in delight at his manly vocalizations.Malo never rushes his vocals, even when the music moves at a fast tempo. He doesn’t even start singing on the opening title song until after more than two minutes of Mariachi-style horn blowing to introduce the mood. This creates a sense of passion. He wrings out every soulful drop on every track. Stylistically, this new album, Sinners and Saints is all over the place. Malo’s big voice anchors down the record whether he’s singing a classic Spanish love song (“Sombras”), a stomping Tex-Mex rocker (“San Antonio Baby”), a funky, laid back ballad (“Staying Here”) or a twangy country song (Rodney Crowell’s “’Til I Gain Control Again”). When he does open his mouth, Malo puts his vocals front and center to be heard. Malo recorded the album at his home studio in Nashville and then finished the production at Ray Benson’s Bismeaux Studios in Austin. Malos also plays guitar, bass, drums, percussion, synthesizer, piano, Mellotron, tron violin, requinot, and ukulele. He wrote the bulk of the nine tracks and added three fine covers that complement the homemade material. Together, the album presents a coherent world view that says more about present day life than a thousand Sunday sermons, newspaper editorials, and radio talk show broadcasts combined, and it does so with beautiful melodies and compelling musicality. ...full text |
| Americantwang |
| That Raul Malo is one of the truly great vocalists—in any genre—is indisputable. That Sinners & Saints, his new record after 2009’s exquisite ramble Lucky One, strains to incorporate all of Malo’s eclectic tastes is more debatable. For much of the past decade, the former Maverick has kept busy, building a respectable solo career. Malo walked away from the critically acclaimed group in 2001, after record label turbulence and the underrated Trampoline failed to catch fire Stateside. With each successive record, Malo has demonstrated ever-greater contempt for Nashville (and mainstream pop-rock, for that matter), and its need to have stars conform to an easily digestible style. If anything, 2007’s After Hours and last year’s Lucky One are firm repudiations of the need for simple labels. Malo ably flits between genres, often within the same song; jazz, country, folk, Latin pop and Cuban flourishes are evident throughout. What holds it all together is that warm, soaring, rich-as-bourbon tenor, capable of tremendous pathos and carnality in near equal measure. Malo can plead with the best of ‘em—as he does on a cover of Rodney Crowell’s “’Til I Gain Control Again,” an emotionally charged highlight of Sinners & Saints—just as easily as he can seduce....full text |
| Austin360 |
| The title might seem to portend a black-and-white affair, but Raul Malo’s follow-up to last year’s well-received “Lucky One” is more a riot of colors, with a strong Texas tinge. Although he recorded much of the album in his Nashville home studio, Malo brought tracks down to Ray Benson’s Bismeaux Studio for some collaborating with Texas Tornados Augie Meyers and Shawn Sahm, as well as accordion ace Michael Guerra of Sahm’s Tex Mex Experience (also a former sideman for Rick Trevino, Malo’s Los Super Seven bandmate). Malo’s terrific new originals “San Antonio Baby” and “Superstar” would not sound out of place in a Tornados set, although the giddy tempos also recall his old outfit, country misfits the Mavericks. For all its upbeat verve, including scintillating organ, zippy accordion and even mariachi horns, “Superstar” is actually a dry rumination on the ephemerality of fame: “No one ever loves you when you’re down and out/flavor of the month is what it’s all about./Take it all, oh, take as much as you can get./Man, how quickly they forget,” Malo croons smoothly, but the grit he lets out is decidedly sardonic. A mid-tempo original, “Staying Here,” sounds like a lost Jimmy Webb song, right down to the lonely ambivalence of the lyrics. “We got kids, one on the way./What will friends and family say when we are through?/For now I’ll be right by your side, hopin’ things will turn out right/but I’m stayin’ here with leavin’ on my mind.” Funky wah-wah guitar and pretty organ and acoustic guitar solos put interesting twists on the arrangement, while the Trishas provide retro female backing vocals. Malo sings as sweetly as Roy Orbison on “Matter Much to You,” but the lilting Latin beat and gentle melody serve not as love song but as a timely plea for everybody to chill out, or at least back off: “You may not share my point of view/or see the world the way I do/I hope it doesn’t matter much to you.”...full text |
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