Ry Cooder
Album: Election Special
Label: Nonesuch
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/ry-cooder

This latest offering from the redoubtable Mr. Cooder is a collection of great new songs that forms a suitably w-Ry kind of wakeup call as the US heads into the dreaded autumn election season. Taken together the nine songs form a powerful political commentary on our times, but in spite of its deep concern, its passionate protest and angry, brooding vibe there's a lot of dark humour in there too, and it's not in any way a continuous 38-minute sloganeering soapbox session.

Cooder's actually a true patriot, and he cares about the fate of his country, scathing in his condemnation of how things are being played out against his country's interests. So Election Special is a kind of campaigning set in the best US tradition of the word, although its other dimension is that it turns out to be a considered song-sequence that's dripping with atmosphere, as strong on the musical referentials as it is on the actual commentary itself and - singularly appropriately - infused with the spirits of contemporary and past Americana that inform the individual settings for Cooder's specified causes. The sidelong, slightly skewed often-jauntiness of these settings makes for an oddball set, but it's a distinctly satisfying one, on which Cooder himself gleefully multitracks (guitars, mandolin, bass) as usual while son Joachim drums away solid.

The man's sometimes kooky but entirely right-on takes on political issues are exemplified by the deliciously funky-country opener Mutt Romney Blues, which is sung from the viewpoint of Republican candidate Mitt Romney's mistreated dog who's just "got to bottle up and go"! The rather sinister Brother Is Gone, despite its lightness of touch, posits the notoriously influential Koch Brothers doing a deal with the devil, while Cold Cold Feeling imagines President Obama musing bluesily as he paces the Oval Office alone at night. The Wall Street Part Of Town is a quite rock'n'roll, even Thompsonesque exhortation to personal protest, while Guantanamo is a tough, almost Springsteen-cum-Clash opus that catchily lambasts the "new growth industry" of prisons.

Kool-Aid finds Cooder sounding uncannily Beefheart-like vocally in his condemnation of lax gun laws, and on the softer-edged old-time mando-country of Going To Tampa he offers to "give all my money if Sarah Palin calls me honey" and take the consequences. The final pair of songs form a rather Guthrie-esque epilogue: The 90 And The 9 (an imagined dialogue twixt father and child) tellingly references the Stones' The Last Time, while the snarling, grinding R&B-inflected Take Your Hands Off It is a further defiant encouragement to protest. And with a vengeance too.

Election Special may have been conceived primarily for this particular snapshot in and of our time, but its themes and preoccupations are timeless and will never cease to be relevant.

David Kidman