Credit the Tex-Mex band Los Pacaminos one thing: There’s no hokey pseudo-biography with fake names and tall tales about growing up in Juarez or San Antonio. The photo on the cover of their self-titled album suggests the truth: A guy with embroidered pants is sitting on a horse with what looks like an English saddle.
Los Pacaminos are Brits, mostly journeymen — guitarists Drew Barfield and Jamie Moses, pedal steel player Melvin Duffy, accordionist Matt Irving. The ringleader, though no ringer, is Paul Young, the British blue-eyed soul singer best-known in the U.S. for his hit 1985 version of Hall & Oates’ “Everytime You Go Away”.
Young is pretty good playing the Freddy Fender part on ballads such as “La Mesa” and “Do We Want The Same Things”. The uptempo opener “My My My” sounds so much like “A Little Bit Is Better Than Nada” that it’s easy to think of Los Pacaminos as little more than a Texas Tornados tribute band.
Purists and devout Tex-Mex followers will find Los Pacaminos falling below the authenticity bar, just as Young’s pallid attempts at covering the Chi-Lites and Jimmy Ruffin did more than a decade ago. Los Pacaminos have a few more degrees of separation from its source than did Orchestra de la Luz, which so perfectly expressed the essence of salsa in the 1990s that even expert ears had a hard time believing they were Japanese.
Los Pacaminos (the name, like the band, is a pseudo-Spanish invention) are a playful payback for the time when people thought that Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and the rest of the Sir Douglas Quintet were actually from England. If you just belly up to the bar, you can have a good time, though not quite as good a time as the players appear to be having.