Ray Davies: Working Man's Café : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

At sixty-three, Ray Davies is still pretty feisty: After getting shot during a mugging in 2004, the Kinks frontman recovered and knocked out 2006’s solid solo album Other People’s Lives. On this follow-up, “No One Listen” finds Davies railing at the Louisiana officials who dropped charges against the man who allegedly shot him. Elsewhere on Working Man’s Café, Davies carps about globalization (“Vietnam Cowboys”), young’uns who seek advice from him (“You’re Asking Me”) and the loss of a local greasy spoon (“Working Man’s Café”). Davies’ tune sense is still relatively intact, and he turns out loose melodies amid nimble bar-band grooves. Unfortunately, Davies’ feistiness fades at times, and he lapses into blandness: A couple of slow cuts sag, and though you can applaud the sentiment behind “Peace in Our Time,” that kind of anti-war anthem has been more or less written a thousand times before. Café offers glimpses of classic Davies: His talent for character sketches shows up on “Morphine Song,” about a hospital ward full of figures both funny and sad. A few more cuts like that one, and Café could have been killer.