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| Pitchfork |
 The 2000s were Lucinda Williams' most prolific decade, as well as her most conflicted. She released four studio albums and one double live, more than matching her output for the previous two decades combined. Drifting away from country music (which had little use for her as a songwriter or as a performer) and toward a gritty strain of roots rock, Williams grew more confessional in her lyrics, which have grown blatantly autobiographical and have coalesced into a larger story built around her romantic ups and downs. Rather than refining her craft, this development has actually had a deleterious effect on her music. In contrast to her first two country-blues albums and her three truly country albums, her four records from the previous decade have been alternately alienating and ingratiating, self-indulgent and self-denying-- eager both to please an audience and disdain them. Her once effortless lyricism has become rigid and workmanlike, with clichéd phrases standing in for complex evocations and words seemingly chosen less for their intrinsic meaning and more for their adherence to her AABB rhyme schemes.Blessed, her ninth studio album, marks the culmination of another trend in Williams' career, one that is much less concrete than the mechanisms of meter and rhyme. Her songwriting has become increasingly about the present rather than the past. Sweet Old World (1992) and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998) possessed a heady notion of personal history, exploring the ways we hold onto old lovers and how certain places (an old juke joint, the town of Pineola, Miss.) can evoke such bittersweet memories. Blessed has only one prominent concrete noun-- in "Copenhagen", named for the city where she learns of a friend's death. And why shouldn't Williams be more interested in the here and now instead of the there and then? If her 2000s albums have rendered her life as it happens, then these new songs chronicle a new and unprecedented chapter: happiness and contentment. In 2009, she married her manager Tom Overby, which means she's writing songs about finding her joy and from the perspective of a happy woman. "Sweet Love" is a straightforward love song that recalls a time when Williams could make simple sound endlessly complex, and "Convince Me" and "Kiss Like Your Kiss" (written for True Blood) are her sexiest songs since "Right in Time" 13 years ago....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams’ discography spans ten studio albums over three decades and several musical styles. As Chris Klimek wrote a few years ago in a Washington Post concert review, “she’s a little Hank Williams, a little John Coltrane, a little Chet Baker and a little Loretta Lynn.” Those comparisons are on point, but she is also much more than the sum of her influences. She more or less spelled out what she does best in the title of her first album of original songs, 1980’s Happy Woman Blues. Her momentum as an artist is fueled by emotional peaks and valleys, and the little moments and long years across which they unfold. Often, the ideal way to receive her work is as a document of where life has taken her in the years since we last heard from her. Although her two most recent studio releases, West (2007) and Little Honey (2008), seemed a little less lived-in, somehow less inspired than her work of the 1990s and early part of the last decade, she returns to fine form on Blessed. Produced by Don Was, Blessed is a many-textured album. Goodbye lover-number “Buttercup” begins the album in a disarmingly familiar fashion, its electric guitars and commanding vocal delivery direct descendants of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998). Yet we’ve very little time to settle into her confident assertions, because “Don’t Know How You’re Living” outlines the sacrifices she’s made on behalf of the song’s unnamed “you”. She is vulnerable and hurt, but pledges to continue her support. In the space of two consecutive songs, Williams, Was, and the band chart out the range of a happy woman’s blues. One key to Williams’ approach that unites the polarity of upbeat and downbeat numbers is her use of lyrical repetition. Fundamental to the blues style, the repetition of lines across bars is sometimes merely mechanical, but Williams’ mantras expand in meaning as her songs develop. The phrases “You weren’t born to…” and “You were born to…” create the lyrical structure for “To Be Loved”, finding a purpose for life somewhere in between the expressions of pain and pleasure that finish each sentence. In this song, all roads lead to love. In “Kiss Like Your Kiss”, the word “never” comes up again and again, describing the ephemeral nature of certain pleasures, especially the colors and sensations of seasons. All of these culminate with “there’ll never be a kiss like your kiss”. Here “never” takes on a positive value—an appreciation of present blessings, as they are not guaranteed to last....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| A marked rebound from 2006's deadly dull West and 2008's uneven Little Honey, Blessed finds Lucinda Williams remembering that she's supposed to be one of America's greatest songwriters. Since she started churning out albums every couple of years with 2001's Essence, Williams hasn't always proven as sharp or consistent in her writing. To that end, Blessed is another mixed bag, but its strongest cuts are easily the best that she's recorded since the landmark Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and that's cause for some celebration. Blessed doesn't get off to a great start. Williams can write a snide, bitter kiss-off song better than just about anyone, but "Buttercup" falls well short of her lofty standards. The dirty blues guitar and Hammond B3 give the song an appropriately gritty backdrop, but its refrain is simply lazy and ineffective. Williams understands how to make minimalism work, but "Now you want somebody to be your buttercup/Good luck finding your buttercup" just doesn't work as a hook and isn't even a good line on its own. "Sweet Love" and "To Be Loved" both benefit from the Southern soul vibe that producer Don Was creates, but they're both simply too repetitive in their structures and lyrical conceits. "The Awakening" fares even worse, with Williams repeating the phrase "In the awakening" in a dreary monotone every few bars, interspersed with heavy-handed lines like "I will have no bosses/I will not bow my head" that never build to a greater thematic statement. Fortunately, those kinds of dire, self-serious songs and lapses in quality control are the exceptions on Blessed, and the album includes some of Williams's most dense, challenging folk poetry. "Seeing Black" includes some blistering electric guitar work from Elvis Costello, giving a palpable rage to Williams's open letter to a friend who committed suicide. "How did you come up with the date and time?" she asks. "You didn't tell me you had changed your mind." It's a real gut check of a song, and a lesser songwriter would have made its color symbolism into something didactic, instead of the thoughtful progression from life to death that Williams observes here. "Copenhagen" is similarly heavy, as Williams reflects on her late manager. She sighs with a lifetime's worth of experience and maturity when she sings, "I'm 57, but I could be seven years old/'Cause I will never be able to/Comprehend the expansiveness of what I've just learned." The album isn't all death and despair. The soulful groove on the pleading "Convince Me" makes tremendous use of Williams's trademark repetition, bringing the weaknesses of a song like "The Awakening" into sharp relief, while the title track searches for silver linings among the socially disenfranchised and underprivileged. "Kiss Like Your Kiss," which originally appeared on the True Blood soundtrack, is one of Williams's deepest, most sensitive vocal performances, as she marvels at the perfection of her lover's kisses. Blessed isn't a "happy" record in any conventional sense, but it's informed by deeply felt hope and contentment. That may make the album something of a tonal shift for Williams, but the best moments here truly rival the peaks of her already legendary career....full text |
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.jpg "Lucinda Williams - Little Honey review")
