Like many genres, country music prizes the personal. Listeners want the impression that an artist sings from experience, that she lives the life she sings about in her songs. Whether it's actually true or not is beside the point. There's no doubt that Lucinda Williams writes what she knows: On two exceptional albums (Lucinda Williams and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road), one really good one (Sweet Old World), and two decent late-career installments (Essence and World Without Tears), she's chronicled her personal romantic ups and downs, the uncertainties that haunt her, and her own Southernness even when regional differences are breaking down. With her divisive vocals and incisive lyrics, it's easy-- maybe too easy-- to regard the singer as indistinguishable from her songs' characters. But she asks for it. Despite her reputation for being lonesome, orn'ry, and mean, the ease with which she expresses herself in country songwriting fueled her legend even when she took nearly a decade between albums.
With her dreary, deeply disappointing new album, West, which was inspired by the death of her mother and yet another bad break-up, Williams might be getting a little too personal. These songs aren't just about her; they sound like they're written specifically for her, with a larger audience only a dim concern. She employs structural quirks-- eccentric repetitions and digressions, purposefully monotone melodies, talking-blues (read: bad rap) delivery, unjustified song lengths-- like defense mechanisms, keeping listeners from digging too deeply into her songs or identifying too strongly with her. This time she seems to be writing to keep people out, fortressing herself against audience expectations. That evasiveness could be interesting, but here it simply leads to shoddy songwriting and lazily bland music.
Consider "Are You Alright?", whose status as the album's lead-off track and first single suggests it's the most accessible song on West. In the span of five minutes, Williams repeats the title 22 times (that's roughly half the lyrics), which seems a little gutsy, if not outright testy. At first it works: the repetition is hypnotic, like a worrisome thought that won't leave your brain, and the bridge, which contains the album's strongest melodic passage, complements that foreboding nicely. As the song proceeds, it becomes clear she isn't building on that repetition, so it becomes a little grating. Nevertheless, "Are You Alright?" proves to be one of the better tracks on West, although you'd probably skip it if it were on any other album.
On West as on her two previous albums, Williams seems to be trying to free herself from the verse-chorus-verse prison, to find new ways to assemble the same song parts. That's admirable in itself, but here her alternatives don't work. After a passable chorus, "Mama You Sweet" digresses into a lengthy tangent tracking the course of pain through a body. Ambiguity is the point: Is the pain her mother's illness or her own grief? Yet it's described so indulgently it sounds goth. On "Wrap My Head Around That", Williams works herself into lyrical knots with her scrawled spoken-word delivery, and she draws out the lite-jazz groove for nine unnecessary minutes.
Elsewhere, West is not so much frustrating as just plain bad. "Fancy Funeral" warns against honoring the dead too much, and in its description of an overly lush ceremony, the old Lucinda emerges, but the song's concerns are so pecuniary that buyer's remorse overshadows any actual grief. In the past, Williams has shown a propensity for blatant moon-june-spoon rhymes, which have worked on previous songs (on title track from Essence, for example, the simplicity of the rhyme scheme feeds the song's overwhelming lust). On West, however, it sounds careless. Here's a verse from "Come On", a bilious kiss-off that descends into dumb double entendres:
You weren't even worth itI'm sorry I ever flirtedThe effort wasn't even concertedYou didn't even make me, come on!
"Come On" at least tries to churn up some rock momentum and give Lucinda a platform to rage against the men who wrong her. The song still fizzles, but the effort is appreciated. But every track seems to sulk along at the same midtempo pace, with the same formless AOR pap that drains the music of melody and all regional specificity. This is "roots" music in only the most general sense. Marked by tasteful percussion and ketchupy guitar lines, the production (by Williams and Hal Willner) nods to folk, blues, country, and decades-old rock and roll without actually incorporating any of these styles into the arrangements. If once Williams held these sounds dear enough to meld her personal lyrics to their traditional frameworks, on West she discards them for a generic mush.
Worst of all, the heartbreak that has been a defining theme in her music sounds newly tedious, the romantic conflicts manufactured. Partly her lyrics are to blame: they incorporate too many common nouns and too few proper ones, and the concrete imagery has given way to vague self-help clichés (the title of "Learning How to Live" says it all) and outright nonsense (on the laughable "What If", she asks, in all seriousness, "What if cats walked on water/And birds had bank accounts?"). On West Williams breaks the first rule of any sort of creative writing: Show, don't tell. She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.
