his slide guitar. The score is largely comprised of minor variations on a single musical theme, with the addition of an elegiac Mexicali border waltz, movingly sung in Spanish by Harry Dean Stanton. As an evocation of the mind set of the American southwest, this soundtrack works almost as well as, say, Bob Dylan's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Cooder's guitar figures seem to be universally applicable, as effective on this trek through the desert as they were on the psychedelic trip through Mick Jagger's London flat in Performance.

Unfortunately, Pans, Texas suffers from the dilemma that plagues so many original soundtracks. Meant to be more than merely a souvenir for fans of the movie, it comes frustratingly close to standing on its own as textural, ambient music. But the album falters seriously during "I Knew These People," an eight-and-a-half-minute monologue by Stanton, punctuated by Kinski's affected Southern drawling interjections. While this conversation is the revelatory climax of the film, its presence on the album is banal and intrusive, a pointless interruption of the musical flow. The fact that the record parallels the movie in such a linear and rigorously literal way ultimately undermines Paris, Texas as an album of haunting background music. (RS 444)

TIM HOLMES