Ry Cooder
Chavez Ravine
(Nonesuch)
The Buena Vista Social Club brought Ry Cooder's name to the attention of a much larger audience than his 1970s roots music collections enjoyed, and this nostalgic album of Mexican-American or Chicano-style songs, evoking Los Angeles in the mid-20th century, is, accordingly, likely to be seen as a natural sequel to that project.
In a way it is, but Chavez Ravine really picks up more where 70s albums like Chicken Skin Music and Showtime - both featuring the accordion of Flaco Jimenez - left off.
Fans of the old stuff should feel right at home. Poverty and dispossession are themes Cooder first explored in the depression-era songs he revived on his early solo albums, and Poor Man's Shangri-La and El UFO Cayo aren't even his first songs about extra-terrestrial visitations to slums. A UFO Has Landed in the Ghetto appeared on The Slide Area, another LA album, back in 1982.