Ry Decides To Take A Little Break

Get Rhythm was the final Ry Cooder solo album for about 18 years until the release of Chavez Ravine and My Name Is Buddy in the last couple of years and arguably those are concept albums that don't really sequence naturally from the earlier body of work. Get Rhythm is a quite a hard driving album on the whole with more aggressive and distorted guitar from Cooder than he normally played on disk. It still followed the by now familiar path of plucking obscure ( Chuck Berry's 13 Question Method ) and the not so obscure ( Presley's All Shook Up ) gems from the rock catalogue, disembowelling them and putting them back together in an idiosyncratic way. The latin side gets a look in with the calypso-ish Women Will Rule The World and there is a beautiful ballad homage to the Tex Mex region, Across The Bordeline. The Johnny Cash written title track ( again totally reworked ) and Going Back To Okinawa are irresistably danceable and Let's Have A Ball is a totally apt way to finish off a fifteen year solo journey through the byways of Americana, like an encore to the world's longest gig.