Ray Davies: Working Man's Café

Ray Davies just can't get enough of himself. With

projects like his "unauthorized autobiography" X-Ray and the recent The Storyteller, the Kinks' leader has

increasingly mined his own life and myth for raw material and inspiration.

Granted, it's a motherlode in no danger of running dry: One of the benefits of

Davies' perpetual underdog status is a backlog of wit and weariness, a prosaic

mystique that Paul McCartney or Pete Townshend can no longer recognize, let

alone embody.

Thankfully, Davies sifts plenty of topical and

even metaphysical worries through his solipsistic filter. Working Man's Café is much punchier and more

muscular than 2006's simmering, mid-tempo Other People's Lives, but he still finds time

to daydream about globalization on "Vietnam Cowboys," mass communication on "No

One Listen," and the existence of God on "The Real World." But the intimacy of

tracks like "Morphine Song"—a wry account of Davies' stay at a New

Orleans hospital after a mugger shot him in 2004—pushes beyond his own

skin and into the world at large. It isn't any kind of breakthrough for the

writer of introverted yet universal pop portraits like "Days" and "Waterloo

Sunset," but Café draws

Davies out just enough to refresh and reinforce his legend.