'Mambo Sinuendo" finds Ry Cooder in Cuba again, this time with Buena Vista guitarist Manuel Galban at center stage. After a string of extremely satisfying albums with the Buena Vista crew, this album departs from tradition and finds the two guitarists exploring the sounds of a '50s Cuban guitar band that never was.
With his punchy tone, spidery phrasing and R&B inclinations, Galban is a very unusual guitarist. Playing music in Cuba in the 1950s and '60s, Galban fell into Cuban popular music when it was becoming hybridized by its popularity around the world. Consequently, his sound is unique to himself rather than being of any particular genre, something that could also be said of Cooder's understated brilliance.
Like the best exotica, "Mambo" conjures fleeting realms of possibility that are always just out of reach. The tunes are bent in various directions by elements of surf, heavy African drumming, Hawaiian steel guitar, early R&B and a pinch of club music that just barely works. The fertile garden in which this fantasy took bloom is Egrem Studios in Havana, home to one of the deepest, warmest-sounding recording rooms on the planet. "Los Twangueros" finds reverb-drenched guitars squeezing every last bit of feeling out of the tune's simple progression while a bata-drum-driven shuffle wiggles from side to side. The melody of "Caballo Viejo" is played on a amusingly cheesy keyboard while an overdriven guitar tone periodically burns though the mix lest we think the music's gone lite. And on "Secret Love" Cooder plays a nearly three-minute solo introduction, gorgeously voicing the tune's tender melody with big, warm chords that must have made the spirits of Egrem Studios nearly swoon.