Paris Texas

Ry Cooder's last album was released way back in 1983, the fairly successful but musically undistinguished 'Slide Area'. Since then! Well, he's done the music for 'Southern Comfort' and 'Paris Texas' but hasn't as yet produced a follow-up LP. In the absence of the latter, this soundtrack album will have to keep the fans happy.

As anyone who has seen it will testify, Cooder's score for Paris Texas is bare and brooding, an almost perfect counterpoint to the starkness and loneliness of the film.

Well, that's what you have here. A series of instrumental pieces, one Texicali song, and a recording of one of the key scenes of the move, harry Dean Stanton and Nastassia Kinski in the peepshow booth, with Cooder playing away behind.

No soundtrack album can ever be 100% satisfactory but this one comes close, if only as one of Cooder's most powerful explorations of the emotive possibilities of the acoustic slide guitar. The last piece is a reworking of Blind Willie Johnson's elegiac 'Dark Was The Night (Cold Was The Ground)', one of the most beautiful lonesome recordings of all time, and Cooder does it full justice. It, and its emotion, are the touchstone for the other tracks throughout. It's an awesome task to set yourself, and it yields moment here than can make you bleed.