Raul Malo, “Sinners & Saints”

Raul Malo. Photo by George Gutierrez

Miami-born, Cuban roots, ten-years-plus with alt-country band The Mavericks, now Nashville-based and pushing his sixth studio album, Raul Malo has the goods to make memorable his Saturday show at Brixton.

Malo must have sixth-sensed that he’d created something unique with the title track, which begins with Jameson Sevits’ forlorn-sounding trumpet (shades of “The Lonely Bull”) only to channel a distinct early 1960s surf beat. It feels like a song that emerged from unrelated genres, and then Malo had the songwriter’s instinct to blend them together.

Other tracks are more conventional, and although they run the gamut in both tempo and style, Malo seems at ease throughout. “San Antonio Baby” straddles the border, fueled by the lively accordion of Michael Guerra (The Tex Mex Experience). One imagines dirt floors, chickens darting in and out, the smell of hot tortillas, train whistles in the distance; and meanwhile the tune just picks us up and sweeps us off our feet. It also pairs well with “Superstar,” recorded with the Texas Tornados, and here it feels like they’ve packed in a side order of Zydeco music. I’m thinking that Alan Miller, who co-wrote both of these songs, had a great deal to do with this.

The record has ballads as well, and Malo wears his heart on his sleeve in the Spanish “Sombra” and then lets that same heart ache a little longer while singing Rodney Crowell’s “‘Til I Gain Control Again,” where such tender and yet distraught emotion is conveyed through the lyrics: “Out on the road that lies before me now/ There are some turns, some turns/ Where I will spin, I will spin/ And I, and I, only hope, only hope/ That you will hold me now, hold me now/ Until I gain control again.”

It’s in compositions like this, or in “Matter Much To You,” that the vocal comparisons with Roy Orbison arise. They are apt, and accrue to Malo’s credit, but I’ll just say this about Roy Orbison, if there’s a heavenly choir in the great beyond, he’s standing tall in the very first row.

“Staying Here” recalls those songs by Jimmy Webb as recorded by Glen Campbell, whereas the album’s closer, a nod to his peers, Los Lobos, has Malo offering up his own take of “Saint Behind The Glass,” which is more of a hymn or a prayer, but somehow a fitting conclusion to a fine and noteworthy disc.

Raul Malo performs at 8 p.m. on Saturday (with Seth Walker; which makes this a doubly nice bill) at Brixton on the Redondo Beach Pier. Tickets, $20. Call (310) 406-1931 or go to brixtonsouthbay.com. ER

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