Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down

In the same way that Neil Young gave a vitriolic state of the nation report to America with 2006's "Living with war" we now have another veteran guitarist and giant of real music making a similar declaration. Like Young, the Californian master musician Ry Cooder doesn't like very much of what he sees at the present time whether it be greedy bankers, embezzling landlords, lamentable television, rabble rousing politicians and the prospect of young men being sent into early graves. The great news is that he wraps up all this social comment in "Pull up some dust and sit down" in some of the finest songs he has recorded in years. This album sees a return to the funky preoccupations of "Bop til you drop" with an excellent gospel base, a nice Mexican tinge and a reverential nod to the folk protest of Woody Guthrie. Throughout the musicianship is so good its almost criminal and its worth stressing that as a protest album Cooder's latest is jam packed with sly humour and repeated listens will leave you with a very broad grin.

The whole album sets out its stall with "No Banker left behind" inspired by a Robert Scheer column in the Huffington Post where Cooder arraigns these vile creatures and comments "Well the bankers called a meetin', to the Whitehouse they went one day/They was going to call on the president, in a quiet and a sociable way/The afternoon was sunny and the weather it was fine/They counted all our money and no banker was left behind". It is very funny but also very cutting, a national anthem for a new depression which could be adopted by the US and a dozen other countries, Next is the excellent Mexican flavoured "El Corrida de Jesse James" which is followed by two of the albums massive highlights. First up is the atmospheric and lovely "Dirty Chateau" a song about the trials and tribulations of Latin immigration where his guitar skills are at a premium. "Humpty Dumpty World" alternatively is the song on the album where Cooder imagines the Lord looking down from heaven with despair and just about indicts the gamut of modern creation. Although special ire is reserved for politicians who are cast as "Craven minions sent from down below/occupy the highest portals of the land/as swift is their climb as sure is their decline/Straight back to hell from whence they came". Superb stuff delivered with the kind of funky panache which is Cooder's special calling card.

The most deceptive song on the album is "Christmas time this year" which on the surface sounds like a jolly Tex Mex romp but was clearly written as an anti Bush war protest song firmly in the tradition of Country Joe McDonald's "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag". These themes are powerfully reprised on the six minute deep blues tour de force "Baby joined the army" where Cooder regrets the conscription of a beloved son. In addition Cooder even manages to perform a brilliant passing impersonation of the old Crawling King Snake "John Lee Hooker for President" and in "I want my crown" produces one of the most swampy blues songs since Dylan's "Cold Irons Bound". The whole thing is rounded off by the stunningly beautiful "No hard feelings" where the ghost of Woody Guthrie is summoned in the opening line where Cooder intones "That this land should have been our land" and proves that as a emotive songwriter he has few peers.

Ultimately all leads you to question why is it that only seasoned veterans like Young, Springsteen or Cooder currently have the confidence and verve to take on the big themes and deliver works which are musically sublime but also have something important to say? As it stands "Pull up some dust and sit down" is one of Cooder's best albums period and is simply magnificent.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down takes the the listener further along Ry Cooder's triumphal progress into his elder years. There is real poignancy in both lyrics and music, the same poignancy that found expression in the character of Kash Buck in I Flathead. The world has changed and not for the better; it's inevitably easier to see that with greater clarity at 64 than in your early twenties, his age when he recorded his first solo albums. Then he sang the blues, both of the dustbowl and the delta. Now he sings a perhaps more universal blues of loss and regret, but not of bitterness.

Above all, Ry Cooder is a folk musician - folk, as in regular people. Character is his forte as a singer - he has always found a voice in both his own and others' songs that expresses human quirks and idiosyncrasies, passions and follies in ways that the lyrics may only have hinted at. Ry is a true character actor, as well as being one the very best musicians working in America today. In this record he again he draws on the sadness and beauty of south-western border music; this is his home turf.

Characters populate Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down; the aging reprobate and his Mexican maid in Dirty Chateau, the sidelined working-class white man (Tea Party fodder) in Lord Tell Me Why, the Kash Buck-like old geezer of Dreamer. These people are real folk. We have known them. We are them.

Contemporary America is not a cultural or political climate to celebrate. No wonder Ry has God dismiss the whole damn thing in Humpty Dumpty World. We may be in a sorry political shape and in thrall to corporate power, but at its heart the people themselves are better than that - these songs find the beauty in their self-expression, however mundane. As with the work of the obvious comparison, Woody Guthrie, Ry has made a fundamentally patriotic record. John Lee Hooker For President.

And kudos to Ry and Nonesuch for the digital booklet. All downloaded albums should carry one. One of the worst things about digital music downloads as a commercial medium is the loss of liner notes, lyrics and pictures.

Wow! Whew! This cd is quite a ride... There is some great classic Cooder playing/sound/style here, and he pulls no punches in his view of where things are at in the US of A of late. The range of vocal stylings and sounds is amazing - on several occasions I asked myself, "Is that Ry singing on this one?". A number of powerful, funny, sad, angry songs. I'm really diggin it, but it will not suit everyone's (political) sensibilities. I definitely get the comparison to Guthrie. Most everything is played by Ry accompanied by his son, Joachim, on drums. If you like Cooder, check it out.