Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| John Williams | Concierto De Aranjuez | |
| John Williams | Plays The Spanish Guitar | |
| John Williams | John Williams Plays The Music Of Barrios | |
| John Williams | Lute Suites Vol 1 & 2 | |
| Lucinda Williams | Car Wheels On A Gravel Road | <p>It isn't surprising that Lucinda Williams' level of craft takes time to assemble, but the six-year wait between Sweet Old World and its 1998 follow-up, <b>Car Wheels on a Gravel Road</b>, still raised eyebrows. The delay stemmed both from label difficulties and Williams' meticulous perfectionism, the latter reportedly over a too-produced sound and her own vocals. Listening to the record, one can understand why both might have concerned Williams. Car Wheels is far and away her most produced album to date, which is something of a mixed blessing. Its surfaces are clean and contemporary, with something in the timbres of the instruments (especially the drums) sounding extremely typical of a late-'90s major-label roots-rock album. While that might subtly alter the timeless qualities of Williams' writing, there's also no denying that her sound is punchier and livelier. The production also throws Williams' idiosyncratic voice into sharp relief, to the point where it's noticeably separate from the band. As a result, every inflection and slight tonal alteration is captured, and it would hardly be surprising if Williams did obsess over those small details. But whether or not you miss the earthiness of Car Wheels' predecessors, it's ultimately the material that matters, and Williams' songwriting is as captivating as ever. Intentionally or not, the album's common thread seems to be its strongly grounded sense of place -- specifically, the Deep South, conveyed through images and numerous references to specific towns. Many songs are set, in some way, in the middle or aftermath of not-quite-resolved love affairs, as Williams meditates on the complexities of human passion. Even her simplest songs have more going on under the surface than their poetic structures might indicate. In the end, <b>Car Wheels on a Gravel Road</b> is Williams' third straight winner; although she might not be the most prolific songwriter of the '90s, she's certainly one of the most brilliant.</p><p>— <strong>Steve Huey</strong></p><hr/><p>When nothing but time can still the pain, a Lucinda Williams song will see you through. In her dry Louisiana drawl, she sings plaintively of abusive childhoods and bad marriages; of drunken bar brawls and suicidal poets; of her own heart that shatters and mends and shatters again, like a puzzle, down-and-out. A magnet for the kind of unrequited love that seems to stop the Earth from turning, Williams persists. Then she's onto the next town.</p><p>Williams was born a rolling stone. Her late father, the poet Miller Williams, was a college professor and the family moved often, to Mexico and Chile and a dozen Southern towns. After Williams was expelled from one New Orleans high school in part for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in protest of Vietnam, dad gave her a list of 100 great books to read instead. (Williams' family of civil rights activists and union workers passed on that spirit of dissent as well.) Miller's profession brought a young Lucinda into contact with Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and, most influentially, Flannery O'Connor. Williams would never let go of her O'Connor-inspired fantasy of writing a Great Southern Novel. Instead, Williams set hers to music, becoming an itinerant Southern Gothic beat.</p><p>At 18, she left home and belonged nowhere. There was no alternative country in 1974, no alternative rock, no Americana, and in at least one Austin bar where Williams hoped to perform, no room for another "chick singer." Nashville told her she was too rock'n'roll. Los Angeles said she was too country. Galvanized by Bob Dylan, Williams' songwriting evoked his poetic ambition, Bruce Springsteen's every-people, Joni Mitchell's confessionalism. The lonesomeness of jukebox country met the darkness of an outlaw. The whiskey-stained tenacity of the blues was spiked with the honey of AM pop. She released two albums, a 1979 covers collection Ramblin and 1980's thrilling Happy Woman Blues, but did not catch a break until a punk label, Rough Trade, came along and signed her (making her labelmates with Stiff Little Fingers, on the one hand; Leadbelly, on the other). Lucinda Williams, in 1988, was her third album and first masterpiece. Ten years later, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was her second.</p><p>Williams was by then 45 and over two decades into her career at the fringes: touring small clubs, working with small labels, the life of an '80s indie band more than a country star. She had released only four albums, filled with female characters who wanted it all—sung by a woman who wanted it all, too. The cool girls in Lucinda Williams songs were always packing up, pawning possessions, saving their tips to split town. There was "Maria," in 1980, who was "wild and restless" and "born to roam." There was the small-town waitress Sylvia, in 1988's "The Night's Too Long," who resolutely declares "I'm moving away/I'm gonna get what I want." "One Night Stand" was like a long-lost string-band ancestor of Liz Phair's "Fuck and Run." These were mini-manifestos for a female life. Williams' feminism rang with no stronger conviction than when she used the first-person to narrate her own desires: "Give me what I deserve cause it's my right!" she longed on her eventual hit, "Passionate Kisses."</p><p>If what she wanted was recognition, or fulfillment, or money—with Car Wheels, she got it. But the road there was almost comically difficult. Labels combusted in her wake: Rough Trade, Chameleon, and American all fell apart after she signed. RCA head Bob Buziak brought her to that label and then got fired. Williams and the music industry seemed allergic to one another. Lucinda Williams was an astonishing album—a classic from a renegade songwriter who never grew too hardened to admit "I just wanted to see you so bad"—but you couldn't blame the greater public for being somewhat oblivious to it, since Rough Trade went bankrupt shortly after its release. Better-known fans kept the songs alive, with covers from the likes of Tom Petty, Patty Loveless, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. In 1997 the Los Angeles Times wrote: "It's a good thing Williams has gotten a boost from others, because her own luck as a recording artist has been miserable."</p><p>The six-year gap between 1992's Sweet Old World and Car Wheels is now charged with myth. By one account, Car Wheels took six tedious years, recorded three times in three cities with three different producers. In reality, there were two years in the studio, from 1995 to 1997, and one scrapped attempt. After Williams started the album with her longtime guitarist and co-producer Gurf Morlix, she felt it was "flat, lifeless, not up to par" and chose to re-record with country fixture Steve Earle and his production partner, Ray Kennedy. She liked their warm, scratchy old equipment and how prominently Kennedy had produced the vocals on Earle's 1996 album, I Feel Alright. When time ran out, Williams finished the album in L.A. with Roy Bittan, a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, adding keyboards, accordions, guitar, and backing vocals. (Though Bittan claimed, "We redid most everything.") A tornado hit Nashville just as Williams was mastering the finished analog tapes; someone had to race to the studio to save them.</p><p>Unlike her hero, Dylan, Williams was mapping directions home. But home, never fixed to one place, was a profound in-between, more like the breeze that pushed her. Car Wheels is a raw, exquisite travelogue of her American South, from Jackson to Vicksburg, from West Memphis to Slidell, from the Louisiana Highway to Lake Pontchartrain. She searched for novelistic detail in back roads and cotton fields and dilapidated shacks. She played furious bluegrass stompers alongside clenching Memphis soul. Williams and an ex-lover drive through Lafayette and Baton Rouge "in a yellow Camino listening to Howlin Wolf." Loretta, Hank, and ZZ Top are called out by name. "I see the whole thing like a pitch for a little movie," Williams once said.</p><p>But like Flannery O'Connor asserted, "Southern identity is not really connected with mockingbirds and beaten biscuits… an identity is not to be found on the surface." Worlds exist beneath Car Wheels' dazzling edges and monumental hooks. As "Concrete and Barbed Wire" evokes its thorny title, Williams wonders about human divides: "This wall is not real/How can it be real?" she sings, nearly cracking a yodel, a possible polemic. (The track was once covered on the compilation Sing Me Home: Songs Against Prison.) And Williams took bold risks: The opener "Right in Time" includes some of her most irreducible, eloquent poetry—"Not a day goes by I don't think about you/You left your mark on me, it's permanent, a tattoo"—before becoming a moaned narrative of a woman alone in bed, pleasuring herself. It is unbelievably sensual, a daydream.</p><p>The honky-tonk title track is a sung memoir of an uncertain childhood, set in a Macon, Georgia kitchen with Loretta in the air, the smell of eggs and bacon lingering. At the whim of a disgruntled parent, a young Williams watches the world blur from a car window. When she sings of a "little bit of dirt mixed with tears," she underscores the vulnerability and toughness at the heart of her character—the shy sense of human imperfection that makes her so heroic, unsettled already from a fixed place. There's an innocence to this phrase, "Car wheels on a gravel road." Williams' melodic wording is sensitive to the bumps you feel, bumps that manifest as chaos and grief and troubled men: drunk men, self-destructive men, men in bands, men doing time, ghost men. Her voice cracks and quivers, allowing ugliness when her subject so demands.</p><p>Earle was deeply inspired by rap in the mid-'90s, particularly Dr. Dre's '92 gangsta rap gamechanger The Chronic. And while there remains no word if Williams shared in that affinity, it's an illuminating prospect: On Car Wheels, her words are dramatically upfront, suspended, locking into mellow grooves. That's especially true on "2-Kool 2 B 4-Gotten," where Williams sings a nonlinear stream of images of rural Mississippi, her most audacious attempt at a surreal, Dylanesque poetry collage. The title of "2 Kool 2 B 4-Gotten" was taken from a phrase scrawled on the wall of a Washington County juke joint—the social gathering spaces of Black Americans in the segregated Jim Crow South—which she found in a 1990 book, Juke Joint, by the photographer Birney Imes.</p><p>But Williams sets her scene 50 miles north, in Rosedale, perhaps in homage to bluesman Robert Johnson, who she namechecks in the song and who sang of the same town in his "Traveling Riverside Blues." Markings from the wall of yet another Juke Joint photo are scattered through Williams' lyrics: "No dope smoking no beer sold after 12 o'clock," "No bad language no gambling no fighting," "Sorry no credit don't ask," "Is God the answer YES." Williams is like a documentarian of these spaces, which incubated the Delta blues and are extinct today. A humble Imes photo of a juke called Turks Place, in Laflore County, also graces the cover of Car Wheels.</p><p>Williams sings "2 Kool" with a toughened poise and a dash of nihilism. "You can't depend on anything really/There's no promises, there's no point," go its opening lines, and while she continues weaving her Southern patchwork—pointing to a serpent handler outside—"2-Kool" ultimately becomes a eulogy for Williams's ex-boyfriend, Clyde. The jumbled narrative seems to mirror the impossibility of making sense of death; it never quite resolves, feels diffuse, feminine even. When Williams sings of "Leaning against the railing of a Lake Charles bridge," of how her former lover "asked me baby would you jump in with me," it recalls another Southern epitaph: Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe." Williams wrote the easeful, bittersweet Car Wheels ballad "Lake Charles" for Clyde as well: "Did an angel whisper in your ear?" Williams cries. "And hold you close and take away your fear/In those long last moments?" It is as close to perfect as elegies come.</p><p>The soaring, strummed-out build of "Drunken Angel" suggests an opening blue sky. Williams's most iconic song is another eulogy, this one for her Texan acquaintance, the outlaw underdog Blaze Foley. She wonders why it had to happen, why he had to die in senseless shootout at 39. Williams' characterization is masterfully vivid: Foley's outcast glory, his slovenliness. As she describes his "duct tape shoes" and "orphan clothes," "Drunken Angel" becomes an anthemic honoring of these hidden people—too eccentric, too outside, too much—who cannot bear this world and who this world, in turn, cannot hold.</p><p>Car Wheels pivots, by side B, to a fully blistering breakup album. Williams knows what belongs at the soul of these pristine songs about merciless heartache, placing them at a nexus of obsession, rejection, and occasional delusion. "Metal Firecracker" is a flawless vagabond love song: As she is wont to do, Williams turns two people sitting in a car into a film treatment of just eight lines, remembering when she was his "queen," his "biker," curling that last word with so much effortless twang you can feel the sun in your eyes. "Once I was in your blood and you were obsessed with me," Williams pines. "You wanted to paint my picture/You wanted to undress me/You wanted to see me in your future." Love that is anything less than life-changing infatuation feels fraudulent in Williams' world.</p><p>A gentle and foreboding ballad, "Greenville" is the resilient sound of a betrayed woman trying, with impossible grace, to keep a toxic man out of her life. The quiet of the song is in stark contrast to this aggressor who screams and fights and lies, who "drinks hard liquor and comes on strong," who compels Williams to imagine "empty bottles and broken glass/Busted down doors and borrowed cash." "Looking for someone to save you," Williams sings, conjuring the feeling of being used, "Looking for someone to rave about you." Strength and tenderness are rarely entwined so consequentially. The angelic harmonies from Emmylou Harris feel like solidarity, like another woman carrying her safely through.</p><p>The rootless rhythms of travel are survival mechanisms on Car Wheels. The album's finger-picked closer "Jackson" is like a drifting Carter Family hymn. The deeper she gets on the road, Williams sings, the less she will miss yet another ex-lover. It's clear this woman knows the game, the fiction, that time alone repairs a wrecked heart. "Once I get to Lafayette, I'm not gonna mind one bit," she sings, convincing herself. "Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won't cry a tear for you." Car Wheels ends in motion, Williams crisscrossing the country in pursuit of herself, the thing she can count on.</p><p>Car Wheels topped the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop critics poll, earned the Grammy Award for Contemporary Folk Album, and entered the Billboard Top 200. In a four star review for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau began: "Sometimes it seems Lucinda Williams is too good for this world." Still, other critics turned mocking eyes at the supposedly "nutty" and delirious "perfectionism" Williams demanded. These criticisms would never so beleaguer a male artist—or as Emmylou Harris put it, "When a guy takes a long time to make a record, he's a genius. If a woman does that, it's a different matter." A Times profile from 1997 illustrated a scene in which Williams' male collaborators questioned her creative decisions and she proved them wrong. When, in '98, someone asked Williams what she learned from the process of making Car Wheels, she said, with some reluctance, "I need to learn to assert myself more in the studio environment because I'm dealing with all men. I wish I had more women to work with."</p><p>Reading the tales of how Williams worked on Car Wheels with a record exec knocking, I'm reminded, again, of her heroine Flannery O'Connor, who refused to open the door of her Georgia home until she had completed her morning writing, even with visitors waiting. "I live in my head, pretty much," Williams said in 1998. For all of its journeying, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road emerges as eternal proof that home, inside you, is worth fighting for.</p><p>— <strong>Jenn Pelly</strong></p> |
| Lucinda Williams | Car Wheels On A Gravel Road - Alternate Version | |
| Lucinda Williams | Essence | <p>Between her well-documented determination to retail full control of her music and the plain-spoken willfulness of her best-known songs, Lucinda Williams is practically the working definition of a strong woman you do not want to mess with, but she reveals a very different side of her musical personality on her sixth album, <i>Essence</i>. Subtle and often stark, Essence is an unusually quiet and frequently downbeat set that depicts a fragile emotional vulnerability which rarely makes its presence felt in Williams' music; there's an unadorned longing in songs like "Blue" and "Lonely Girls" that's new and deeply affecting, and the leaf-in-the-breeze quaver of Williams' voice on "I Envy the Wind" is as heart-rending as anything she's ever committed to tape. But while a blue mood dominates <i>Essence</i>, this isn't an album about the blue funk of heartbreak, but a chronicle of the search for transcendence over sorrow in our lives, as her characters look for a path out of isolation ("Out of Touch"), try to find answers through faith ("Get Right With God"), or reconcile love with the desires of the flesh ("Essence"). As a songwriter, Williams has long shown a knack for charting the human heart and mind with intelligence and economy, and Essence finds her at the peak of her form; the delicacy of this music does not speak of weakness, but of the passion and bravery it takes to bare one's soul. And while Williams has gained a certain infamy for her obsessive perfectionism in the studio, the quality of her work speaks for the wisdom of her decision-making process, and Essence proves how well she understands the art of recording; producing in collaboration with Charlie Sexton (Tom Tucker and Bo Ramsey also contributed), Essence sounds full and rich even in its quietest moments, and her sweet-and-sour voice blends with the arrangements with subtle perfection. Those hoping for another dose of the bluesy roots rock of <i>Car Wheels on a Gravel Road</i> may be disappointed, but if you want to take a deep and compelling look into the heart and soul of a major artist, then you owe it to yourself to hear Essence.</p>— <b>Mark Deming</b> |
| Lucinda Williams | World Without Tears | <P>While many considered Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Essence as definitive statements of arrival for Lucinda Williams as a pop star, she "arrived" creatively with her self-titled album in 1984 and opened up a further world of possibilities with Sweet Old World. The latter two records merely cemented a reputation that was well-deserved from the outset, though they admittedly confused some of her earliest fans. World Without Tears is the most immediate, unpolished album she's done since Sweet Old World. In addition, it is simply the bravest, most emotionally wrenching record she's ever issued. It offers unflinching honesty regarding the paradoxes inherent in love as both a necessary force for fulfillment and a destructive one when embraced unconsciously. Fans of her more polished, emotionally yearning material may have a hard time here because there isn't one track — of 13 — that isn't right from the gut, ripped open, bleeding, and stripped of metaphors and literary allusions; they're all cut with the fineness of a stiletto slicing through white bone into the heart's blood. World Without Tears is, among other things, predominantly about co-dependent, screwed-up love. It's about relationships that begin seemingly innocently and well-intentioned and become overwhelmingly powerful emotionally and transcendent sexually, until the moment where a fissure happens, baggage gets dumped in the space between lovers, and they turn in on themselves, becoming twisted and destructive — where souls get scorched and bodies feel the addictive, obsessive need to be touched by a now absent other. The whole experience burns to ashes; it becomes a series of tattoos disguised as scars. The experience is lived through with shattering pain and bewilderment until wrinkled wisdom emerges on the other side. Most of Williams' albums have one song that deals with this theme, but with the exception of a couple of songs, here they all do.</P><P>Musically, this is the hardest-rocking record she's ever released, though almost half the songs are ballads. Her road band — on record with her for the first time — cut this one live from the studio floor adding keyboards and assorted sonic textures later. The energy here just crackles. Sure, there's gorgeous country and folk music here. "Ventura," with its lilting verse and lap steel whining in the background, is a paean to be swallowed up in the ocean of love's embrace. In fact, it's downright prosaic until she gets to the last verse: "Stand in the shower to clean this dirty mess/Give me back my power and drown this unholiness/Lean over the toilet bowl and throw up my confession/Cleanse my soul of this hidden obsession." The melodic frame is still moving, but the tune reverses itself: It's no longer a broken-hearted ballad, but a statement of purpose and survival. "Fruits of My Labor" is a straight-ahead country song. Williams shimmers with her lyric, her want pouring from her mouth like raw dripping honey. Her words are a poetry of want: "I traced your scent through the gloom/Till I found these purple flowers/I was spent, I was soon smelling you for hours...I've been trying to enjoy all the fruits of my labor/I've been cryin' for you boy, but truth is my savior." One can hear the grain of Loretta Lynn's voice, with an intent so pure and unadorned. But the muck and mire of "Righteously," with its open six-string squall, is pure rock. It's an exhortation to a lover that he need not prove his manhood by being aloof, but to "be the man you ought to tenderly/Stand up for me." Doug Pettibone's overdriven, crunching guitar solo quotes both Duane Allman and Jimi Hendrix near the end of the tune. "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" is a Rolling Stones-style country-rocker with a lyric so poignant it need not be quoted here. "Over Time," a tome about getting through the heartbreak of a ruined relationship, could have been produced by Daniel Lanois with its warm guitar tremolo and sweet, pure, haunting vocal in front of the mix.</P><P>"Those Three Days" may be the most devastating song on the record, with its whimpering lap steel and Williams' half-spoken vocal that questions whether a torrid three-day affair was a lie, a symbolic sacrifice, or the real thing. The protagonist's vulnerability is radical; she feels used, abused — "Did you only want me for those three days/Did you only need me for those three days/Did you love me forever just for those three days." Yet she holds out hope that there is some other explanation as the questions begin to ask themselves from the depth of a scorched heart and a body touched by something so powerful it feels as if it no longer owns itself. Pettibone's solo screams and rings in the bridge to underline every syllable and emotion. "Atonement" is something else altogether; it's a punkish kind of blues. If the White Stripes jammed with 20 Miles in a big studio it might sound like this, with Williams singing from the depths of a tunnel for a supreme megaphone effect. She growls and shouts and spits her lyrics from the center of the mix. And Taras Prodaniuk's fuzzed-out basement-level gutter bass is the dirtiest, raunchiest thing on record since early Black Sabbath. "Sweet Side" is almost a poem in song, attempts to inspire someone who's been broken by life to accept his goodness. It is not a rap song despite what's been written about it so far. It's more in the tradition of Bob Dylan's early talking blues, but with a modern organic rhythm played by Jim Christie instead of drum loops. In addition, there is the gorgeously tough "People Talking," the most straight-ahead country song Williams has written since "Still I Long for Your Kiss" (from the Horse Whisperer soundtrack, not the version that appears on Car Wheels, which is dull and lifeless by comparison). Here again, Pettibone's guitar and the slippery, skittering shuffle of Christie's drumming carry Williams' voice to a place where she can sing her protagonist's personal, soul-searing truth without restraint.</P><P>World Without Tears is a work of art in the Henry James sense; it is "that which can never be repeated." It is as fine an album as she could make at this point in her life — which is saying plenty. While she has never strayed from her own vision and has made few compromises, this album risks everything she's built up to now. The audience she's won over time — especially with her last two records — may find it over the top, which would be too damn bad; it'd be their loss. Hopefully, history will prove that World Without Tears sets a new watermark for Williams, and is an album so thoroughly ahead of its time in the way it embraces, and even flaunts, love's contradictions and paradoxes — the same way the human heart does. It is this writer's hope that people will be listening to and learning from it for years to come.</P><P>— <B>Thom Jurek</B></P> |
| Lucinda Williams | Live @ The Fillmore | <p>Lucinda Williams has earned a reputation for her meticulous approach to making albums, but a careful listen to her work suggests that she isn't trying to make her music sound perfect, she just wants it to sound right, and she isn't afraid to spend the extra time waiting for the charmed moment to get caught on tape. This attitude seems to be borne out in her first-ever concert album, <i>Live @ The Fillmore</i>, which manages to sound carefully considered, and a model of "warts and all" authenticity at the same time. Recorded during a three-night stand in San Francisco, the album captures Williams' band in superb form -- Doug Pettibone's guitars, Taras Prodaniuk's bass, and Jim Christie's drums merge into a tight and emphatic groove machine that can match Williams's many moods, whether she's quietly contemplative on "Blue," rocking out hard on "Changed the Locks," or howling the blues on "Essence," while the deeply resonant recording and mix gives them the royal treatment. Williams herself is a slightly more complicated matter here -- her performance is deeply into the spirit, so much so that sometimes her melismatic wanderings and broad phrasing sound like they're verging on caricature. But this is clearly a recording of a performance, and by the time we get to the end of disc two, the broad strokes have coalesced into something quite remarkable; as Williams searches through the nooks and crannies of her songs, you sense she's discovering things that she didn't expect to find, and it's a tremendous thing to hear. Lucinda Williams is an artist who writes from her soul, and she's thoroughly unafraid of letting her passion show when she sings. If that makes for strained technique, it also results in very real art, and this album offers a privileged glimpse of a singular songwriter in full flight.</p><p>— <strong>Mark Deming</strong></p><hr/><p>For better or worse, Lucinda Williams has spent the past couple of years living down Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. On Essence and especially World Without Tears, she replaced the Southern storytelling, travelogue nature, and plainspoken poetry of her breakthrough with an increasingly confessional tone and a decreasingly friendly voice. Her disposition has never been exactly sunny and her voice has always been a little gauzy, but she's grown defiantly prickly; as she obsessed over a broken relationship, wondering how it could cause as much happiness as pain, her songs have become more emotionally explicit, her voice more boozily abrasive. "Ghosts in the wind that blow through my life/ Follow me wherever I go," she sings on "Bus to Baton Rouge", "I'll never be free from these chains inside/Hidden deep down in my soul."</p><p>This trend toward extreme introversion crystallizes with Live @ the Fillmore, recorded over two nights in San Francisco. While the double live album is a time-honored tradition, Williams makes it immediately clear that this isn't going to be Double Live Gonzo! or Frampton Comes Alive! The first disk begins not with the requisite upbeat showstarter (although this version of "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" would have been perfect both sonically and thematically), but with a slow ballad—three of them, in fact. Obviously, this is not the Lucinda Williams of the Car Wheels on a Gravel Road tour (chronicled on a New West Records DVD, released concurrently).</p><p>The 22 songs on these two disks are culled mainly from Essence and World Without Tears, with only a few from Car Wheels, Sweet Old World, and Lucinda Williams (and none from her first two albums). Instead of leading us through the South of "Crescent City" and "Jacksonville", Williams takes us first out to California on "Ventura", one of only three geographically defined songs on the set ("Pineola" and "Bus to Baton Rouge" being the others). Almost compulsively Williams airs her sins and misgivings on songs like "Fruits of My Labor", "Three Days", and "Are You Down", sounding both gushing and guarded. But her vocals, even on talking-blues songs like "Sweet Side" and "Righteously", reveal a woman living through all the messy frustration and unalleviated desire she's singing about.</p><p>After a deliberately slow start, Live @ the Fillmore picks up considerably toward the end of the first disk. Williams spits venom on "Changed the Locks" and "Atonement", while her backing band, especially guitarist Doug Pettibone, generates ferocious bar-blues rock. The second disk reverses that trajectory, starting hard and fast but ending soft. The barreling momentum of "I Lost It" and "Joy" gradually gives way to the sexual/narcotic fervor of "Essence", the low simmer of "Are You Down", and the faltering disappointment of "American Dreams", which sounds even more like diluted Springsteen in this setting.</p><p>The old Lucinda of Car Wheels reappears briefly on the final two tracks (both of which, ironically, postdate that album). She's there in the detailed memories and interior drama of "Bus to Baton Rouge" as well as in the delicate vibrato of "Words Fell". Both tracks are a little more hopeful than the equally gentle ones that begin this set, suggesting Williams has managed to exorcise some of those ghosts blowing through her life.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Lucinda Williams | West | <p>The title of West reflects the change in Lucinda Williams' life as she moved to Los Angeles. It also reflects what had been left behind. Williams is nothing if not a purely confessional songwriter. She continually walks in the shadowlands to bring out what is both most personal yet universal in her work, to communicate to listeners directly and without compromise. If Essence and World Without Tears took chances and stated different sides of the songwriter and her world, West jumps off the ledge into the sky of freedom, where anything can be said without worry of consequence and where anything can be said in any way she wishes. It's entirely appropriate that West was released on the day before Valentine's Day 2007, for it's a record about the heart, about its volumes of brokenness, about its acceptance of its state, and how, with the scars still visible to the bearer, it opens wider and becomes the font of love itself. But the journey is a dark one. First there's the music and the production. Williams chose Hal Willner to produce West. Williams, who'd been writing a lot, demoed some songs before she brought in Willner. He stripped down the demos but kept the scratch vocals. From there, the pair created the rest of the album together, never re-recording Williams' initial vocals. The vocals were accompanied by her guitar playing; Willner wanted her inherent phrasing and rhythmic flow. Willner also brought his own crew to play with Williams. This collaboration —as unlikely as it might seem on the surface —results in something utterly different and yet unmistakably Lucinda Williams. West is a warm, inviting, yet very dark record about grief, the loss of love, anger at a lover who cannot deliver, and embracing the possibility of change. In other words, it's not without its redemptive moments. Williams has put all of her qualities on display at once with an unbridled and unbowed sense of adventure here on her eighth album. She, her bandmates, and Willner have come up with exactly what pop music needs: a real work of art based in contemporary forms and feelings. West is Lucinda Williams' magnum opus thus far, an album that will no doubt attract more than a few new fans, and will give old ones, if they are open enough, a recording to relish. West is flawless; it is actually destined to become a classic.</p><p>— <strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p><hr/><p>Like many genres, country music prizes the personal. Listeners want the impression that an artist sings from experience, that she lives the life she sings about in her songs. Whether it's actually true or not is beside the point. There's no doubt that Lucinda Williams writes what she knows: On two exceptional albums (Lucinda Williams and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road), one really good one (Sweet Old World), and two decent late-career installments (Essence and World Without Tears), she's chronicled her personal romantic ups and downs, the uncertainties that haunt her, and her own Southernness even when regional differences are breaking down. With her divisive vocals and incisive lyrics, it's easy—maybe too easy—to regard the singer as indistinguishable from her songs' characters. But she asks for it. Despite her reputation for being lonesome, orn'ry, and mean, the ease with which she expresses herself in country songwriting fueled her legend even when she took nearly a decade between albums.</p><p>With her dreary, deeply disappointing new album, West, which was inspired by the death of her mother and yet another bad break-up, Williams might be getting a little too personal. These songs aren't just about her; they sound like they're written specifically for her, with a larger audience only a dim concern. She employs structural quirks—eccentric repetitions and digressions, purposefully monotone melodies, talking-blues (read: bad rap) delivery, unjustified song lengths—like defense mechanisms, keeping listeners from digging too deeply into her songs or identifying too strongly with her. This time she seems to be writing to keep people out, fortressing herself against audience expectations. That evasiveness could be interesting, but here it simply leads to shoddy songwriting and lazily bland music.</p><p>Consider "Are You Alright?", whose status as the album's lead-off track and first single suggests it's the most accessible song on West. In the span of five minutes, Williams repeats the title 22 times (that's roughly half the lyrics), which seems a little gutsy, if not outright testy. At first it works: the repetition is hypnotic, like a worrisome thought that won't leave your brain, and the bridge, which contains the album's strongest melodic passage, complements that foreboding nicely. As the song proceeds, it becomes clear she isn't building on that repetition, so it becomes a little grating. Nevertheless, "Are You Alright?" proves to be one of the better tracks on West, although you'd probably skip it if it were on any other album.</p><p>On West as on her two previous albums, Williams seems to be trying to free herself from the verse-chorus-verse prison, to find new ways to assemble the same song parts. That's admirable in itself, but here her alternatives don't work. After a passable chorus, "Mama You Sweet" digresses into a lengthy tangent tracking the course of pain through a body. Ambiguity is the point: Is the pain her mother's illness or her own grief? Yet it's described so indulgently it sounds goth. On "Wrap My Head Around That", Williams works herself into lyrical knots with her scrawled spoken-word delivery, and she draws out the lite-jazz groove for nine unnecessary minutes.</p><p>Elsewhere, West is not so much frustrating as just plain bad. "Fancy Funeral" warns against honoring the dead too much, and in its description of an overly lush ceremony, the old Lucinda emerges, but the song's concerns are so pecuniary that buyer's remorse overshadows any actual grief. In the past, Williams has shown a propensity for blatant moon-june-spoon rhymes, which have worked on previous songs (on title track from Essence, for example, the simplicity of the rhyme scheme feeds the song's overwhelming lust). On West, however, it sounds careless. Here's a verse from "Come On", a bilious kiss-off that descends into dumb double entendres:</p><p>"Come On" at least tries to churn up some rock momentum and give Lucinda a platform to rage against the men who wrong her. The song still fizzles, but the effort is appreciated. But every track seems to sulk along at the same midtempo pace, with the same formless AOR pap that drains the music of melody and all regional specificity. This is "roots" music in only the most general sense. Marked by tasteful percussion and ketchupy guitar lines, the production (by Williams and Hal Willner) nods to folk, blues, country, and decades-old rock and roll without actually incorporating any of these styles into the arrangements. If once Williams held these sounds dear enough to meld her personal lyrics to their traditional frameworks, on West she discards them for a generic mush.</p><p>Worst of all, the heartbreak that has been a defining theme in her music sounds newly tedious, the romantic conflicts manufactured. Partly her lyrics are to blame: they incorporate too many common nouns and too few proper ones, and the concrete imagery has given way to vague self-help clichés (the title of "Learning How to Live" says it all) and outright nonsense (on the laughable "What If", she asks, in all seriousness, "What if cats walked on water/And birds had bank accounts?"). On West Williams breaks the first rule of any sort of creative writing: Show, don't tell. She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Lucinda Williams | Little Honey | <p>The long waits for Lucinda Williams' third and fifth albums—eight years for Lucinda Williams and six for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road—have become the defining story of her career. During those lengthy intervals she established herself as a perfectionist who took her own sweet time making records and tweaked every aspect until it met with her highly strict requirements, which of course she never explained to anyone else. She worked intuitively rather than scientifically—the songs had to feel right. But those albums fully justified both the waits and her peculiar particularity: Williams' self-titled album expressed her inner desires and uncertainties so comfortably that country and blues felt like second skins, and Car Wheels is a tough and tender travelogue. Neither sounds overworked; she toiled for nearly a decade on each to sound completely off the cuff.</p><p>In the decade since Car Wheels, Lucinda has increased her output considerably, releasing three studio albums and a double live with only two or three years between them. If once she was difficult to work with, she has becoming increasingly difficult to listen to, penning uninspired songs that rest uneasily on lyrical clichés, unpalatable vocal scrawls, and a talking-blues delivery that obsessed her but confounded all others. Her gradual downfall sounded like a concerted retreat from roots-rock respectability (no crime there) and an unhealthy, unhappy self-sabotage, and 2007's West was the one thing that no one ever expected from Lucinda: an utterly irredeemable album, short on melodies and insights but long on self-absorption. It would have been a fascinating failure were it not so unfathomably dull.</p><p>Perhaps it's fitting that her new album, Little Honey, begins with "Real Love", an unironic, unsentimental statement of newfound happiness that sounds like 1992's Sweet Old World—or at least Essence. It's not a Mary J. Blige cover: Instead of searching for a real love, she's found one, and it involves a guitar and an audience. Williams reasserts her talent for taking a vague sentiment and unraveling it into something real and immediate. Her vocals sound perfectly slurred, the guitars nicely abrasive, the lyrics suitably modest but incisive. It's enough to raise expectations that Little Honey will be a significant uptick in her output.</p><p>It is. And it isn't. While Williams generally sticks to her strengths and suppresses most of her more unsavory musical habits, she maintains her curious reliance on tacky AABB rhyme schemes and lyrical clichés like "It's raining cats and dogs" (on the otherwise excellent "Circles and X's"). From anyone else, that line might not warrant scrutiny, but Williams—the daughter of former poet laureate Miller Williams—has shown a poet's eye for detail, phrasing, and juxtaposition, laying out her sentiments in a conversational style and downhome cadence, and her earlier work inspired highest standards in her listeners. Lines like that pepper the album, but every bad habit of hers appears in the embarrassing "Honey Bee", an anonymous rocker on which she literally shouts her lines: "Oh my little honeybee/ I'm so glad you found me/ Buzz around you hive now/ You're in overdrive now." John Belushi's "King Bee" sketch was more dignified.</p><p>After that side-one lull, Little Honey picks up considerably with a string of tracks that recall the old, exacting Williams. She sounds like she might even be having fun on the gospel-blues "Well Well Well" and "Jailhouse Tears", a duet with Elvis Costello that's a fitting sequel to "There's a Story in Your Voice", their previous pairing on his 2004 album The Delivery Man. "If Wishes Were Horses" creates an animal metaphor that actually something meaningful: "If wishes were horses, I'd have a ranch," she sings on the lovely chorus. Her vocals are wounded yet measured, as heartbreaking as you know she can be, even on "Heaven Blues", which recalls the acoustic blues of her first two albums.</p><p>After such a build-up, it's all the more discouraging that Little Honey falters at the end. "Plan to Marry" poses a gorgeously mopey lament: "Why do we marry? Why do we fall in love? Why do we keep believin'?" She sounds like she's going to wash her hands of the whole romantic mess, but sadly, those questions don't remain rhetorical: She actually answers them, turning the song into a saccharine lover's anthem. It's a poor lead-in to "Long Way to the Top", an aimless AC/DC cover with showy gospel backing vocals and a jaded, defensive tone that leaves a bitter aftertaste. For Lucinda, it's a long way from the top, although it's nothing a good eight years wouldn't fix.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Paul Williams | Tribute To Robert Johnson | |
| Sonny Boy Williamson | This Is My Story | |
| Sonny Boy Williamson | Bummer Road | |
| Sonny Boy Williamson | Nine Below Zero | |
| Sonny Boy Williamson | His Best | |
| Wilson Diesel | Short Cool Ones | |
| Jesse Winchester | Jesse Winchester | |
| Jesse Winchester | Jesse Winchester | |
| Jesse Winchester | Learn To Love It |
Showing 1961–1980 of 2096 reviews
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