GOOD SOULS BETTER ANGELS

If I had to rank Lucinda Williams’s previous studio albums—and I suffer from a weird compulsion to do exactly that—then, depending on mood, I would place them in something like the following order:

1. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
2. Essence
3. Lucinda Williams
4. World Without Tears
5. Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
6. Little Honey
7. Sweet Old World
8. West
9. Blessed
10. Ramblin’
11. Happy Woman Blues
12. This Sweet Old World
13. The Ghosts of Highway 20

On first listening, I would insert Good Souls Better Angels below West and Sweet Old World—whose songs are consistently superior, but which suffers from production that has always seemed to me incongruously bright and vapid—a problem corrected, of course, on its 2017 reboot, This Sweet Old World. Incongruously, because the world depicted is anything but sweet—but the ability to report back on lives shattered by disappointment and cruelty, and express the essence of those experiences vocally, is what makes Williams the brilliant singer-songwriter she is. On one occasion—at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz*—I got an immediate sense of her super-sensitive nature, when she noticed me drawing her from right in front of the stage and glowered just enough to make me lower my Bristol Board and pop my pen back in my mouth.

Emotionality is racked up to a 9 on Good Souls Better Angels, which has a somewhat stripped-down blues-rock sound that occasionally merges into an inchoate punk aesthetic (such as on Wakin’ Up), and takes us surprisingly far from the unique Country Rock sensibility of Car Wheels—even if Little Honey is also essentially a rock album, replete with psychedelic touches, and the electrifying pop rock of Little Rock Star [which happens to be about Pete Doherty, and the false allure of fame].

You know that Man Without a Soul is going to be about Donald Trump before the first words are sung—before the overdrive-heavy intro, even—and, while it’s a little on the nose for my tastes, it’s nevertheless far from artless, and lyrically she still runs rings around most songwriters. The line “I don’t wanna be no special rider” might have formed a more poetic basis for a title than Big Black Train, but the song has a genuinely beautiful melody; while Pray the Devil Back to Hell is introduced by a gypsy jazz violin that lightens the overwrought tone. Bad News Blues seems like a rewriting of Dylan’s Everything Is Broken after downing a pint of bourbon—and opening track You Can’t Rule Me is everything you wanted to say on a first date had you known what was coming after the hangover lifted.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa0Wajk8vF0 [Not my video]