Hermanos Gutierrez: El Bueno Y El Malo

There is nothing fancy about this music. A couple of guys with guitars—Hermanos Gutiererrez, playing without pretense inside subtle, almost subliminal accompaniments, making sounds that have an on-the-surface simplicity permeated by a sense of the profound.

The Ecuadorian-born, Swiss-raised Estavan Gutierrez and Alejandro Gutierrez are the brothers, los hermanos. "When Alejandro and I are playing together, it's like driving a car," says Estevan. "It's like taking a road trip." El Bueno Y El Malo is a musical road trip through the high plains, a lone rider a half mile off the highway, his hat pulled low, his collar pulled up against the chill breeze; or it is a roll through an expansive desert of endless horizons, an abandoned town in the distance, boarded up with warped wood, its walls sagging beneath a roof of sandblasted shingles; or it might be a drive along an unpopulated coast, steel-blue water on one side, a grassy rise on the other, the grass the color of a lion's coat after a long dry summer. A gusting, dry Santa Ana wind pushes a tumbleweed down the slope. It bounces across the highway, across the windshield's field of vision.

It is a perfect road trip soundtrack, bringing spaghetti westerns and Ennio Morricone's score of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to mind, with a sense of loneliness and ghost town hauntings, a cantina at the end of the street, two or three laconic customers looking up as you enter, then back silently at their warm beers and their empty shot glasses. It also brings Bob Dylan's Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out Of Mind (Columbia, 1997) to mind, with its fog-shrouded resonance and spooky atmospherics.

El Bueno Y El Malo is a dark but ultimately hopeful statement, a loose yet cohesive and relaxed guitar album that sounds as if it was not planned out to be a grand statement, but ended up being one anyway.