Ray Davies

Ray Davies

Working Man’s Café

(New West)

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“You can take the boy out of Britain—and, apparently, a good deal of Britain out of the boy,” said Gary Graff in Billboard. As frontman of the Kinks, Ray Davies stood out as a social commentator; his satirical observations lent a wry sense of humor to songs deeply rooted in working-class England. Now the 63-year-old puts his beefs with Britain behind him to address America’s issues on Working Man’s Café. Gritty and rooted in Southern soul, this is his “most ‘American’ work” in more than 40 years, full of notes of nostalgia and pleas for reform. Davies has a particular love affair with New Orleans, said Jim Farber in the New York Daily News. This makes his perspective on the country’s state of affairs not that of an outsider but of an intimate. Politics—along with corporations, a struggling economy, and plain-old love—is his battlefield throughout the album. He gripes about globalization (“Vietnam Cowboys”), shrugs off his role as elder statesman (“You’re Asking Me”), and recalls a simpler time before strip malls and fast-food franchises (“Working Man’s Café”). Where his earlier work partly shrouded his “disillusionment in the flag of nostalgia,” these songs are hardly subtle, said Alastair McKay in Uncut. We share Davies’ concerns, but his quibbling would have “embarrassed his younger self.” He attempts a call to arms, but instead sounds like a man out of time.