Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down

After putting his solo career on hold while he immersed himself in a series of fruitful world music collaborations, in recent years Cooder has returned to the American vernacular music which originally inspired him. Pull Up Some Dust… is his fourth album in half a dozen years and it's the closest in spirit to his classic releases of the early 70s. The main difference is that he's no longer a young shaver paying homage to the country blues idioms of early 20th century American music; he's now become a mature and gnarled part of that tradition himself. Whereas those early albums found him covering songs from another era about Billy The Kid and Franklin D Roosevelt, he's now writing contemporary parables about the bankers, right-wing Republicans and corporate hoodlums whom he blames for destroying modern America. The likes of ‘No Banker Left Behind’ ‘Humpty Dumpty World’ and ‘No Hard Feelings’ are all brilliant executed excursions into this fertile territory, while on ‘El Corrido de Jesse James’ (a Tex-Mex border waltz that wouldn't have sounded out of place on 1974's Chicken Skin Music), he imagines the outlaw returning to wreak vengeance on Wall Street with his trusty ‘44. James merely robbed banks, Cooder points out; he never made families homeless like today's foreclosing villains of American high finance. Elsewhere there are a couple of Norteño rave-ups featuring the wonderful accordion playing of Flaco Jiménez, some dirty blues-rock, a swamp-infested gospel stomp and the wired and witty talking blues of ‘John Lee Hooker For President’. What Cooder is now writing are fearless folk songs for a new Depression, brilliantly channelling the spirit of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly for the era of Goldman Sachs and Halliburton.