Lucinda Williams – West Review
Posted by James Munson on 02.20.2007
Alt-country heroine releases another album about heartache and loss. What it lacks in faster-tempo numbers it makes up for in anguish and sincerity.
Nobody has ever accused Lucinda Williams of wearing her heart on her sleeve. As far as established songwriters go, she’s one of a few who can evoke a number of different emotions that tug at the hearts of listeners via her words and her vocal delivery. Forget all those whiny, seemingly pain-ridden emo bands that make their careers off of fake suffering and look no further than Lucinda Williams, the same woman who once sang “You took my joy and I want it back” and “I oughta know about lonely girls”. Her songs are specifically meant to conjure a certain kind of emotion; the feeling of loneliness and heartache that can only be cured by putting another quarter in the jukebox and having another drink.
It’s been four years since Lucinda’s last record, 2003’s World Without Tears, and many things have changed since then. She broke-up with an ex- and lost her mother. These events, naturally, fuel most of her newest album, West, which is an exercise in suffering, love, and forlornness. While these are typical themes in Williams’ work, the overall effect on her songwriting here is a sedative, mid-tempo state running a majority of the songs.
This slower-paced songwriting works to her advantage on some tracks more than others. “Mama You Sweet” is a chilling ode to her late mother. Light drumming and a downbeat acoustic guitar riff intensify Williams’ reflecting about when “pain hits a wall/and doesn’t know which way to go/and ocean says I’m crying now/and tells pain to follow.” On another slow-tempo ballad “Everything Has Changed”, she confronts uncertainty and loss of love (“I can’t feel my love anymore…/Now I don’t know where my faith has gone”). In the superb “Words”, she optimistically sings, “You can’t kill my words, they know no bounds/My words are strong and they don’t make me sick.”
This is a sad-sounding record as most songs here don’t reach the faster-rocking (as far as Lucinda goes) status as other catalogue favorites “Metal Firecracker”, “Joy”, or “Get Right With God”. That’s perfectly acceptable, except when the album starts to drag, most notably during the nine-minute plus “Wrap My Head Around That”. One exception, and not a good one, is the bitter condemnation of her ex in “Come On”. While being one of the songs that builds faster in tempo during the chorus, it also features some of the most tired, mundane lyrics I’ve heard from Lucinda Williams (“Dude, I’m so over you/You don’t even have a clue/All you did was make me blue…/You can’t light my fire so fuck off…”). Yikes.
I once read in a magazine or a book somewhere that Lucinda Williams doesn’t associate herself with other country musicians in Nashville. After listening to any of her records, it’s fairly easy to see why. Her mainstream success may suffer from not writing the same music akin to the country/pop hybrid that other “country” artists make nowadays, but then again Lucinda has always had more in common with Wilco than Big-N-Rich. West, while certainly not her best work, is another respectable release from a woman who possesses no shortage on tales of deprivation and grief. There’s no hoping she’ll make another record this good, because she hasn’t let us down yet.
The 411: Sounding a bit more weathered and somber than previous releases, Williams has made another album ideal for rainy days, overcoming breakups, or drowning your sorrows in alcohol. This isn’t Car Wheels, Lucinda Williams or Essence, but nothing else will be and it’s a perfectly fine record nonetheless.
