LOS ANGELES, CA- I don’t write about full albums very often.
Part of that is simply bandwidth. There is an endless amount of new music arriving every week, and giving an entire album the attention it deserves requires something I don’t always have enough of: time.
But every once in a while, an album comes along that makes the decision for me.
Thee Sinseers’ Love Stories is one of those albums.
I put the record on while doing chores around the house and, when it ended, I played it again. Then again. Somewhere around the third or fourth consecutive listen, I realized I wasn’t really listening for the purpose of writing about it anymore. I just didn’t want to turn it off.
There is something wonderfully thick about this record.
Maybe it’s the standup bass. Maybe it’s the guitars pushed through amplifiers to capture that warmer, sixties-adjacent tone. Maybe it’s the horns, the strings or the way an ensemble this large somehow understands when not to play. Or maybe it’s Joey Quiñones’ voice, particularly when it floats upward into that sweet, velvety falsetto.
Whatever the combination, Love Stories has that low-slung, windows-down, cruise-the-boulevard quality that makes the music feel like it has been around much longer than it actually has.
At one point, I genuinely wondered whether I was listening to covers.
I wasn’t.
These songs just feel old.
And I mean that as the highest compliment possible.
There are plenty of artists who have successfully reached backward for inspiration. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings immediately come to mind, a group that could summon the spirit and physicality of vintage soul without reducing it to novelty or costume. But what Thee Sinseers are doing feels somewhat different.
The roots here are particularly deep and particularly local.
Emerging from East Los Angeles, Thee Sinseers exist within the tradition commonly described as Chicano soul or souldies, where generations of Mexican American musicians and listeners absorbed doo-wop, R&B and soul and folded those sounds into a distinctly Southern California culture of backyard parties, school dances, oldies and lowrider cruises.
You can hear echoes of the great sweet-soul groups in Love Stories. The Stylistics and The Delfonics aren’t difficult to imagine when Quiñones rises into that falsetto. There are shades of The Chi-Lites and The Intruders in the romantic melancholy and lush arrangements. Closer to home, the lineage runs through artists such as Sunny and the Sunliners and East LA pioneers Thee Midniters.
And somewhere in there I hear Smokey Robinson, too.
Not because Quiñones is trying to sound like Smokey. He isn’t. It’s something more fundamental: the ability to make male vulnerability sound effortless and cool. These are songs in which men can hurt, plead, regret, confess and still somehow sound impossibly smooth doing it.
Yet calling Love Stories a “throwback” album ultimately feels inadequate.
That’s because Thee Sinseers don’t seem particularly interested in pretending that it’s 1968.
For Love Stories, the band intentionally pursued earthier instrumentation and warmer tones, but Quiñones has explained that during the process it never felt as though they were consciously “making soul music.” They were making their music.
That distinction matters.
This isn’t nostalgia manufactured in a recording studio. The sound Thee Sinseers draw upon never completely disappeared from the communities that nurtured it. In East LA, oldies, soul and lowrider culture have remained intertwined across generations. Thee Sinseers aren’t excavating some forgotten musical artifact. They’re creating new music from a language they’ve inherited and made their own.
Love Stories sounds old because its musical vocabulary is old. It sounds alive because the people speaking that language still are.
And then there are the actual love stories.
Despite its title, this isn’t an album particularly interested in happily-ever-after.
The band’s own reference point for the record is the 1993 East LA film Blood In Blood Out, with characters connected through love and loyalty even as hardship, mistakes and diverging lives pull them apart. Likewise, Love Stories considers what happens before the happy ending, after it, and sometimes instead of it.
Love here can be romantic, familial, successful, broken or unresolved.
On “Let’s Fall In Love (Again),” for example, the desire for reconciliation eventually gives way to something considerably more complicated. The protagonist doesn’t simply ask for another chance. He acknowledges his own part in creating the heartbreak from which he now wants relief.
That little bit of accountability changes everything.
It also illustrates why the album works beyond its immaculate aesthetics. It would be easy to fall in love with Love Stories simply because of how good it sounds. But underneath all that warmth are songs interested in how messy love actually becomes once real people get involved.
The concept even extends to the album’s artwork, which incorporates photographs of the band members’ parents and, with them, the relationships and histories that existed before Thee Sinseers ever made this record. Some of those love stories endured. Others didn’t.
They remain love stories nevertheless.
That’s the world Love Stories inhabits.
Perhaps that’s also why the album hit me as hard as it did. There is familiarity embedded in these songs even when you’ve never heard them before. The production recalls records you’ve known your entire life. The melodies seem to trigger memories they couldn’t possibly belong to. By the second or third listen, choruses that are only a few hours old somehow feel like old friends.
I was so impressed that after repeatedly playing the album, I did the thing that I do when I get unusually excited by new music I’ve just listened to: I went looking for the vinyl.
In fact, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Maybe I’d gotten in early on this one. Maybe I’d stumbled across a band just before everybody else figured it out.
Apparently not.
Some of the limited-edition pressings I had my eye on were already sold out.
So much for being ahead of the curve.
Evergreen vinyl it is.
There is something appropriate about wanting Love Stories on vinyl. Not because vinyl automatically makes music more authentic, and certainly not because a record needs surface noise to qualify as soul. It’s because Love Stories feels like an album in the traditional sense: something designed to be played from beginning to end, flipped over, and played again.
That’s essentially what I had already been doing digitally anyway.
Thee Sinseers have spent years developing this sound, and Love Stories feels like the point at which all of those influences, personalities and experiences have settled into something cohesive. The group approached this album differently than its predecessor, Sinseerly Yours, entering the studio with its larger ensemble and individual roles already established. Arrangements were considered collectively. Individual egos were subordinated to whatever served the song.
You can hear that discipline.
For music this lush, Love Stories rarely feels overcrowded. The arrangements breathe. Instruments appear because they belong there, not because somebody needed something to play.
The result is an album unmistakably informed by another era without becoming trapped inside it.
That may be the most impressive thing about Love Stories.
I started listening to Thee Sinseers thinking I’d discovered one of the best throwback soul albums I’d heard in a very long time.
After living with it for a while, I’m not sure “throwback” gives them enough credit.
The Stylistics, The Delfonics, Smokey Robinson, Sunny and the Sunliners and Thee Midniters may help us locate the musical neighborhood Thee Sinseers inhabit. But they don’t entirely explain what the band has built there.
Thee Sinseers aren’t trying to take us back in time.
They’re showing us that some sounds never needed to leave.
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