Lucinda Williams

A sense of loss dominates West, whether Williams' inspiration comes from contemplating the death of her mother or another sour relationship. Such weighty topics should play to her strengths, but foggy-headed potboilers like "Unsuffer Me" and "What If" make the collection her least focused in years. With the rare, sharp detail -- like carefully named bouquets on "Fancy Funeral" or the yearning of "Where is My Love?" -- she evokes her most vivid work, but if not for the impeccable playing of her band, especially guitarists Bill Frisell and Doug Pettibone, much of West would be directionless.

Lucinda Williams today is a different artist from the one whose disgracefully belated
commercial breakthrough came with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in 1998. That Lucinda
had released four albums of her own songs on four labels in eighteen years -- all of which,
back to 1980's girlish, strummed-acoustic Happy Woman Blues, favored concrete narrative
and verse-chorus structures. This Lucinda has released three studio albums plus... More >

Williams has cited Bob Dylan's bone-simple Time Out of Mind as the inspiration for 2001's Essence, and West is in that mode. Riding a deep, lazy groove and keyed to a title refrain Williams repeats twenty times, the opener, "Are You Alright," employs the commonest words in the language to pound home how totally (and tenderly) you can miss your ex-lover. Or conceivably your mother after she's passed, as in the more imagistic "Mama You're Sweet" reminds us. Many of West's tracks are very nearly in this class, including the pained "Unsuffer Me," the vituperative (and, remarkably for Williams, funny) "Come On," the obsessive avant-barnburner "Wrap My Head Around That," and the formal exception "Fancy Funeral," a detailed, practical advice song Williams wrote after family pressure compelled her to plan and pay for her mom's. But then there are the washouts. "I'm learning how to live/Without you in my life"? "The mystery and splendor don't thrill me like before/And I can't feel my love anymore"? These aren't intrinsically disastrous lines, though "mystery and splendor" is pushing it; it's possible to imagine Trisha Yearwood or Nanci Griffiths covering them. But in neither case does the music put the songs across. And then there are the mock metaphysics of "What If," which with its silly conditionals is even more regrettable than her former low point, the biblical "Broken Butterflies." (Grade - ****)