Lucinda Williams
Album: Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone
Label: Highway 20
Tracks: 20
Website: http://lucindawilliams.com

This is Lucinda's 11th studio album, and the first on her own label. Like its predecessors, it digs deep into the emotions, but it feels like it's her deepest yet: an often exhausting 20-track, 102-minute procession through those emotions that (bravely) leads off with what might be regarded as its trump card: Compassion, a chanson-like setting of a 1997 poem by Lucinda's father Miller, is a stripped-bare-and-naked vox-and-acoustic-guitar piece that's almost uncomfortably raw and painful in its expressive impact. Compassion, of course, being the overriding emotional quality here, a key trait in Lucinda's world-vision, notwithstanding all her hard-won knowledge and her independence of thought and deed, and staying right at the very root of the whole album.

Lucinda's trademark utterly genuinely lived-in voice, warm yet tough, tender but rough, alternately slurred and precise but always nigh cracking with emotion, is a notable feature of this opening track of course, and it carries on through the whole set without respite - she's sure on great form throughout, necessarily dominant but trading off (and getting off on) the brilliant, comparably ballsy musical support she receives from her band (the core of which comprises such luminaries as Greg Leisz, Val McCallum, Pete Thomas, Davy Faragher and Patrick Warren) and cameo guests Bill Frisell, Tony Joe White and Ian McLagan. Lucinda's own special brand of soul-infused country has never sounded more persuasive, and the tastily gritty natural flavours of gospel and blues in her singing are expertly mirrored in the musical arrangements, which exhibit just the right balance of tight musicianship and loose laid-back creativity (the whole set feels refreshingly unhampered by any desire for trimming or editing). The unrivalled immediacy of Lucinda's vocal delivery is tangible; and although the intimacy of her lyrics is paramount, the very act of sharing their stories and message calls forth equally intimate musical utterances, individual statements like keyboard fills, and most especially guitar solos on songs like Burning Bridges and Cold Day In Hell (to highlight just two examples quite early on in the set) that speak volumes through their notes and progressions. And what's more, there's some especially stunning playing from Messrs. Frisell and Leisz in their empathic interplay on the album's closer, its one non-original, a seriously beautiful (and lovingly stretched-out) cover of J.J. Cale's Magnolia.

It's truly amazing that in spite of her frankly admitted recognition that "there are only so many things you can write about love, sex, death, redemption", Lucinda has come up with so many fresh new songs built around those very topics - she sure has been on a creative roll here, and it's not just numbers like This Old Heartache and Stowaway In Your Heart that are destined to become classics - although these are arguably the most obvious ones. Lucinda simply can't seem to put a foot wrong; she nails all those emotions down with her authentic delivery, whether on the raunchy Creedence-like Protection, the assertively preachy (but right-on) Foolishness, the pleading soulfulness of One More Day, the altogether more pensive Wrong Number, the harder-edged swampy West Memphis, the growlingly sultry Something Wicked This Way Comes, the driving heavy-duty gospel-beater Everything But The Truth, or the mix of inward-looking confessional and definitively observant on When I Look At The World. Justified Attitude is the watchword; this album is a proud display of resilience in the face of adversity, and the compelling conveyance of bitter insights through honest portrayal of vulnerability. A phrase of her father's, "the saddest joys are the richest ones", which Lucinda adopted for the lyric of Temporary Nature, is at the heart of her vision.

In a nutshell, Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone represents Lucinda's deepest and most extended artistic statement yet, nigh on flawless and certainly her most satisfying to date on all counts. An absolutely magnificent achievement.

David Kidman