I, Flathead : Ry Cooder : Review : Rolling Stone

Many of guitarist Ry Cooder's best albums are movie scores, including the folk-culture clash of 1985's Alamo Bay and the purple-prairie atmospheres of 1989's Paris, Texas. So it makes sense that, offscreen, he writes music like a film director. I, Flathead completes Cooder's trilogy of albums about endangered subcultural California (following 2005's Chavez Ravine and 2007's My Name Is Buddy), and a deluxe edition of this CD comes with a novella. You will need it to fully grasp the concept — Cooder plays a fictional race-car driver and struggling country singer, Kash Buk — but it is easy to enjoy the songs as individual scenes, by turns sultry (the mariachi-R&B opener "Drive Like I Never Been Hurt"), comic (the Western-swing gag "Spayed Kooley") and romantic (the cantina-band yearning of "Filipino Dance Hall Girl"). Cooder sings the album's best number, "5,000 Country Music Songs," in character, as Buk, but in a way closer to the 1972 gem "Boomer's Story" — like a guy making slow headway in an indifferent world, to tart, poignant guitar-playing that is a sweet, short movie in itself.