Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Lucinda's 'World' achingly beautiful, 13 April 2003
Lucinda Williams is a woman of constant sorrow. At least, it seems that way on her misleadingly titled seventh album World Without Tears. Laced with heartache and sorrow, steeped in loneliness and disillusionment, these 13 achingly beautiful songs capture the notoriously uncompromising singer-songwriter adrift in a stark, candlelit landscape of woozy country waltzes and raw-bones, deliberately paced roots-rockers. Opening cut Fruits of my Labour sets the tone with its languid tempo and vibrato-soaked guitar swirls, which are echoed in longing ballads like Ventura, the old-timey Over Time, the torchy Worlds Fell and the chilly Minneapolis. The hour-long set is by no means a one-dimensional affair, though. First single Righteously is a sexy, funky little pout powered by searing, Coltrane-inspired guitar solos and one of Lucinda's steamier vocals -- she just turned 50 this year, but the way her bittersweet pipes purr lines like, "When you run your hand all up and run it back down my leg / Get me all worked up like that" will practically melt the wax in you ears. It righteously breaks the hypnotic spell cast by those ballads, while the gnarled blooz-stomp of Atonement, the ragged Stonesy jive of Bleeding Fingers and the plain-spoken folktronic monologue of American Dream also go a long way from keeping Lucinda from getting stuck in a Cowboy Junkies-style rut. Stylistic variety aside, though, it's the refrain of American Dream -- "Everything is wrong" -- that more succinctly reflects Lucinda's perspective on World Without Tears. Or as she puts it on the title cut: "If we lived in a world without tears / How would bruises find a face to lie upon? / How would scars find skin to etch themselves into?" And how, we could ask, would Lucinda Williams find anything to write songs about? If we're lucky, we'll never know.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
'America's greatest living songwriter' does it again, 26 May 2003
Country music is difficult for me. Too many hats, too much misogyny disguised as down-home family values. And my Dad loved it.
There are exceptions, those outstanding songwriters who hover in the aisles of that musical church, writing songs that reflect your life in its mirror and breaks it into tiny glorious pieces. Hank Williams Sr, Gram Parsons at his best and sometimes EmmyLou Harris, Steve Earle, occasionally Ryan Adams, and Lucinda Williams.
These songs sound so urgent, so heartfelt, so racked with need that it takes a while to appreciate how perfectly formed, well played and well produced they are.
These are songs for adults, who've been around the block a few times, aren't without scars, and are fiercely passionate despite all that. You'll dance, you'll cry, you'll recommend it to people you care about.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Best Yet?, 20 May 2003
This may be Lucinda Williams best album yet. But that's hard to say as she has produced some very good material in the past. If you are familiar with Williams' work then the themes running through this CD will be no surprise. As always, what you get is a bunch of raw, open, honest, uncompromising and very well written songs. Many people view her as one of the best songwriters in the U.S of the last couple of decades. I'm not sure I'd go that far but she's certainly up there. What she excels in is capturing the everyday, the ambiguous and the painful. So on this CD we have songs about relationships that never got started, about the difficulty of having a relationship with someone who was abused as a child, loneliness, the opressiveness of organised religion, the failure of the consumerist dream and so. Heavy stuff. But well observed and crafted into beautiful songs. The writing on this is possibly her strongest yet.
It's hard to give an impression of what her work is like, if you don't already know it. Put into descriptive words, it loses something - it's hard to describe. What's easier to talk about, and makes a huge difference on this album, is how it was made. Basically, this is a four piece band playing live. The whole thing was recorded in someone's front room (ok - it used to be a ballroom but ...). This makes the CD sound quite different from her other CDs. It's much warmer, more immediate, more passionate. It really works and brings the songs to life much more than I've heard on any of her previous work. It helps that the band is VERY good. Pettibone is a great | |
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