WILLIAMS, LUCINDA

The follow-up to Lucinda Williams's commercial/critical breakthrough CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD is anything but a market-geared, commercial effort. Rather, ESSENCE is the sound of lovelorn melancholy being delicately bottled, then gently let loose in a recording studio with a group of skilled roots-rockers to ease it along on its way to the microphone. The tender beauty of these heart-on-sleeve tunes goes hand in hand with the overwhelming, unapologetic misery of the sentiments expressed in the lyrics. As always, Williams displays her gift for getting the maximum poetic mileage out of the simplest verbal structures. The simply rendered images of heartbreak and emotional isolation are organic and resonant, those qualities being shared by the earthy but carefully arranged production that frames Williams's plaints. The mixture of looseness and purposefulness (along with the album's emotional tone) puts ESSENCE in the same general ballpark as Bob Dylan's Daniel Lanois-produced angst fest TIME OUT OF MIND.

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