Alternative country
"Little Honey"
Lucinda Williams. Lost Highway. 13 tracks.
Grade: B
There are flashes of uncharacteristic joy on "Little Honey," Lucinda Williams' ninth studio album; they're notable because for the better part of her 30-year career she's managed to avoid this feeling. Williams' voice is a broken, collapsed sigh and, in the last decade especially, she has used it to masterly effect, extracting a battered beauty from songs about disappointment, frustration and sometimes even sneering anger.
In 1998, the sublime "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" made her something more than a name-drop for roots-music aficionados. "Little Honey" is the least coherent of her albums since then, less potent and focused than "Car Wheels" or last year's desperately melancholy "West."
When she's hurting, she can still sear. "Circles and X's," written in 1985 and the best song here, is starkly eloquent.
Too often here, though, Williams gets bogged down turning her magnifying glass back on music-making.
As for Williams' emergent happiness, it has infected her lyrics but not, it turns out, how she delivers them. "Real Love," the album opener, is as plain (and, to be frank, artless) a statement of devotion as she's recorded, but with her rasp, it almost sounds like a taunt, as if she hopes her last guy is listening in, stewing.
On "Knowing," Williams sings of love catching her by surprise, but there's ambiguity in the lines, most of which begin, "I didn't know." As sentiments expressed in the present, they're quietly insightful assertions of love. But Williams sings them heavily, as if she is already looking backwards: It sounds a lot like an elegy. And heard that way, it makes perfect sense.
— Jon Caramanica
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• Days before his sold- out, Oct. 18 show at the Tabernacle, Ray LaMontagne adds "Gossip in the Grain" to his Americana catalog.
• The bonus of purchasing folk-pop singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson's "Be OK" is that proceeds go to Stand Up To Cancer.
• Soulful Nikka Costa resurfaces with "Pebble to a Pearl."
• Maybe best known for her contributions to acid jazz ensemble Incognito, "Metamorphosis," reminds fans of Maysa's solo strength.
• Nadirah Shakoor — one-time member of Atlanta's Arrested Development and frequent vocalist for Jimmy Buffett — goes it alone on "Nod to the Storyteller".
• "This Christmas, Aretha" — Franklin, that is, offers a holiday CD.
• Joining the Queen of Soul in seasonal offerings is one of contemporary jazz's king of vocal — and facial — acrobatics, Al Jarreau, with "Christmas".
—Sonia Murray
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