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 insertGood Souls Better Angelsbelow West andSweet 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…