Where Cesar Rosas' album is conservative, the second album by Latin Playboys--consisting of David Hidalgo, Loius Perez, and Los Lobos producers Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake--croons and clangs its way for thirty-five minutes through a wildly mutated Latin soundscape. Both albums share an unprepossessing quality, an air of having been made for the fun of it, but it's obvious that the Playboys enjoy a very different sort of fun.

Dose, as this second album is nudgingly called, continues the grungy minimalism of the preceding Los Lobos album Colossal Head. That album found Hidalgo and Perez in a playful mood, wedding thick percussion and atmospherics to weird, jokey half-songs whose charms tended to pale over time, especially next to Rosas' stronger, more serious efforts. That playfulness continues here, free from the expectations reserved for a Los Lobos record, meaning that what might have sounded self-indulgent in the past can now be admired for the let's-try-everything spirit in which it was made. While you couldn't exactly call Dose a "serious" record, it commands your attention through sheer sonic attack: the textures woven by these dissonant guitars and pounding rhythms seem to belong to a genre that hasn't been created yet.

The album begins with an instrumental (many tracks have little or no vocal accompaniment), a buzzy, fiery affair called "Fiesta Erotica" which you are emphatically advised NOT to include on that little seduction mix-tape you were cooking up, as shrieking pseudo-Arabic violins aren't most people's idea of a turn-on. There's a shaggy-dog story set to music called "Ironsides," in which a boy (Perez on vocals) relates the story of his padre's beloved old pickup truck, a cacophonous beater whose presence sends the boy into spasms of embarassment, especially when Pape talks about trekking the family out to the drive-in with it ("Mom, can't we take Lily's Celica? We can all fit!"). The humor isn't labored but light, and its warped-but-honest recollection of childhood makes this a track to savor.

The Playboys' humor roams free, turning up everywhere from the title of "Cuca's Blues" (the song features neither a blues scale nor blues changes; in other words, it isn't a blues) to an instrumental called "Tormenta Blvd," which, just for kicks, is mixed entirely into the right stereo channel, causing this reviewer no end of consternation when he used the just-purchased album to test a new pair of headphones. There's the bizarre story of the "Locoman" who, after bundling the world in chicken wire, "grew to the size of a mountain/That was all that he could do." (Hey, that'd be enough for me.) There's "Toro," an instrumental so short you'll wonder if you didn't just imagine it. And where there's humor, can the grave be far behind? "Paula Y Fred" is a murder ballad pared down to its bare essentials; the lyrics, roughly translated, go something like "Paula loves Fred but Fred doesn't love Paula/Fred doesn't like Paula because he loves Lucy instead/Paula killed Fred because Fred doesn't like Paula/Lucy killed Paula and now she herself is dead." The title track also conjures images of death, as a young man who may have just committed a crime (we aren't sure), wondering "What happens to a kid ... when he grows up brown?", is visited in his sleep by "a guy in white" who tells him:

Don't matter who you are, this side or that side of the fence Or you got a pile of money or you can barely pay the rent When you die and they take you and they put you in the ground No matter who or what you are--you end up looking brown.

Subtle social commentary is just one of the pleasures of Dose, a record which, despite its brevity and lack of pretensions, could act as a worthy signpost for any musician talented enough to follow its lead. At a time when the media swoons over the new crop of mainstream Latin stars, Dose suggests an ambition for Latin music far beyond the amiable pop of Ricky Martin or Jennifer Lopez--and it's a hell of a lot funnier.