Ry Cooder 'Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down' Nonsuch

Outside the mainstream Ry Cooder can make the music he wants to and he can also express his deeply held views. Ones that have run through his musical career since it began. There's no mistaking the mood of the album its right there from the opening track No Banker Left Behind. El Corrido de Jesse James follows and it Flaco Jimenez on accordion with a band of brass players to give a border sound to the track in which Jesse James tells his friends in heaven that he wants his trusty 44 revolver back so that he can "put that bonus money back where it belongs." Quicksand is about those refugees that come to cross the border into the USA getting caught in the quicksand of the title. After that he targets "rabble rousing politicians on the TV screen" (Humpty Dumpty World), scarred and mutilated soldiers (Christmas Time This Year), dead-end situations (Baby Joined The Army), the working man (Lord Tell Me Why) and the Republican party (If There's A God) amongst other topics and targets. All of this is done with integrity and compassion as well as truth and passion. Much of the music draws from a time when the various forms of roots music, American music were unsegregated. Cooder moves from simple but stately voice and guitar of Baby Joined The Army to the Tom Waits-like rough and tumble of I Want My Crown to the channeled blues of John Lee Hooker for President, a song that is as powerful as it is primal. Cooder is joined in this musical adventure by his son Joachim on drums as well as associates like the aforementioned Jimenez, Jim Keltner, and vocalist Terry Evans as well as other comrades to deliver these tales of a land as morally impoverished now as it was in the Twenties. There is much to admire here on Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down as there has been on his last three albums and in his work through the years. It is heartening to hear and feel the anger in these beautifully played songs that will find a place in the heart of any Ry Cooder fan.