Tag: Lucinda WIlliams

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Music Record Reviews

Six New Records With Memphis Roots

Charles Lloyd & the Marvels + Lucinda Williams

Vanished Gardens (Blue Note)

This year’s release is quite a detour from this Memphis native’s 2017 effort, with his band the Marvels (his usual rhythm section plus Bill Frisell on guitar and Greg Leisz on pedal steel and dobro) joined by singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams for half the album. The end result is an unpredictable mash-up of Americana and jazz, even when Lloyd and band are recasting Williams’ earlier songs in a new light, by turns skronky and ethereal. Her ragged-but-right delivery is a perfect foil to the more urbane harmonic weave of the combo.

Released June 29th.

The Maguire Twins

Seeking Higher Ground (Three Tree)

Though these gifted siblings grew up in Hong Kong, this album owes a great deal to Memphis. Moving here at 15, the twins first studied jazz at the Stax Music Academy and then at UT-Knoxville under Memphis native Donald Brown. The renowned pianist helped the two blossom into a drum and bass team that is almost telepathic. This debut, produced by Brown, also features him playing Fender Rhodes on one song, and the classic horn-driven sound they create tacks between arranged heads and slightly unhinged workouts that nod to classic ’60s and ’70s jazz, balancing soul and innovation perfectly.

The Klitz

Rocking the Memphis Underground 1978-1980 (Mono-Tone)

These women ricochet from euphoric chants and original shouters, to a druggy “Brown Sugar.” Yes, Jim Dickinson and Alex Chilton appear (the latter singing “Cocaine Blues”), but it’s the band’s courage in stomping out these numbers themselves, professionalism be damned, that makes this album great.

Fuck

The Band (Vampire Blues)

Carrying on the scatological band-name torch, we have this posse, originally from Oakland, now with two members living in Memphis. The onetime Matador darlings redefined a pop-friendly, yet deeply weird sensibility in their ’90s and ‘oughts releases, with loose, intimate singing paired with a flair for unique indie rock textures. Though their performances are few and far between these days, they’ve surprised everyone with what may be their best album. Released June 22nd.

Faux Killas

Chiquita (Self Released)

Mainstays in the local club scene for years, this group only recently morphed from a trio to a quartet, adding Seth Moody on synth. It’s a game-changer, as the band now has twice the hooks. Like some Mid-South cross between early Roxy Music and the Damned, the songs are well-crafted and melodic (as with the soaring pop of “Anxious Love”), yet feature tasteful atonal synth squeals and counterpoints along with more familiar, if electrifying, guitar riffs and leads. While the production is somewhat muted, it does give the album a homespun vibe that befits these straight-up Midtown boho rockers.

Revenge Body/Ihcilon

New Rituals for New Superstitions (Self Released) How to classify this split/collaboration between two sonic explorers of the Memphis scene? The term “ambient” has been oversold as a catch-all for mellow, mid-tempo techno beats, but this album ignores all that. Both artists deal in new textures for a post-industrial world. Hearty analog sounds avoid the cloying familiarity of much retro synth music today, but beware that the results can be unsettling. Revenge Body’s “Panic Dream” is just that, achieved, like many of the best sounds here, with a fine appreciation of noise textures rather than pounding beats.

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Music Music Features

Williams 101

In the decade between 1988 and 1998, Lucinda Williams was perhaps the most accomplished pop musician on the planet, if not the most prolific. Three albums, 1988’s Lucinda Williams, 1992’s Sweet Old World, and 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, completed a far-too-long and arduous journey from mysteriously underrecognized critics’ fave to honest-to-goodness star.

A subsequent trio of records, completed by this year’s West, has proven Williams to be an artist different from the one she was before the gold rush of Car Wheels. Up until that breakthrough, Williams made perfect albums. Since, she’s made good ones where perfect songs have to be excavated. Post-Car Wheels, her music has been messier and more frequent.

This new Lucinda is a less concrete writer. Once beloved for her tangible, lived-in imagery, Williams has morphed into a more elemental, abstract songwriter. The songs are more generalized and sound less worried over — and worse off for it.

Essence, Williams’ 2001 follow-up to Car Wheels, was well named. The album’s tempo was slower — much slower — than her previous work and the lyrics much more spare. Essence was recorded with Bob Dylan bandmates Tony Garnier and Charlie Sexton (Sexton also produced), but the end result is more Time Out of Mind than “Love and Theft,“ more mood music than song music.

The opening cut, “Lonely Girls,” signals Essence‘s lyrical simplicity and emotional self-examination. Lucinda Williams‘ opener, “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad,” swept by in just 21 lines, nine of those the title refrain. But “Lonely Girls” makes do with just 21 words, with Williams meditating — in her breathy, marble-mouthed, and wondrous vocals — on “heavy blankets,” “pretty hairdos,” and “sparkly rhinestones,” the alleged accoutrements of lonely girls, before reaching the song’s inevitable conclusion, “I oughta know about lonely girls.”

After that, such concrete images were harder to come by, with Williams attempting (and often succeeding) in breathing life into Creative Writing 101 metaphors (“Steal Your Love,” “I Envy the Wind”).

World Without Tears (2003) was a further step away from the lyrical solidity of her earlier triumphs. It’s the album where Williams threatened to surrender to her most potentially annoying shtick, which isn’t her easily fetishized Southernness or even her geographic specificity but her seemingly helpless romanticization of the substance-addled and emotionally wounded. In other words, this was the Lucinda Williams record for fans as enamored with beautiful losers (or, in the artist’s own parlance, “drunken angels”) as she is. It even contains a song called “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings,” which seemed to be a test of sorts — a title sure to inspire some fans to hoist a Corona in hearty approval and others to forswear alt-country forever.

West pushes Williams further from her trad blues/country roots, and the songs are more uneven than ever. But there’s still greatness to be found. “Fancy Funeral” is a throwback. It would have fit in perfectly on Lucinda Williams or Sweet Old World and is as good as anything Williams has ever recorded. Relatively unadorned and heartbreakingly direct, the song has Williams singing: “Some think a fancy funeral/Would be worth every cent/But for every dime and nickel/There’s money better spent/Better spent on groceries/And covering the bills/Instead of little luxuries/ And unnecessary frills.”

“Come On” might be the funniest Lucinda Williams song ever (humor never having been one of her more prominent qualities), while “Where Is My Love?” gets back to place-name-checking, which seems like a gimmick at this point. But it’s her gimmick and it works for her, rooting around in Helena and Tupelo looking for her love. (After failing to find her joy in West Memphis previously.) And “Are You Alright?” taps into Williams’ penchant for audacious repetition to sharp effect.

Elsewhere, though, Williams drifts. On “Mama You Sweet,” she fills repetitions of the title refrain with a breathless rush of imagistic poetry not found on those earlier albums. “Learning How To Live” lapses into self-help speak. And “What If” is just loopy. (“I shudder to think/What it would mean/If the president wore pink/Or if a prostitute was queen”).

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Music Record Reviews

Lucinda Williams sacrifices perfection on her latest.

Lucinda Williams’ new album, West, is a loose and rambling affair. There are moments of exquisite beauty followed by listless sections that barely make an impression. Most of the songs average over five minutes in length, and “Wrap My Head Around That,” a rap/blues rant, comes in at a robust 9:06. The title speaks of a direction, but the trip Williams takes is anything but a straight line.

There’s nothing unusual about this except that for the Lucinda Williams of old, the idea of an album like West would have been nearly inconceivable. Williams is a notorious perfectionist, and stubborn souls will always face obstacles when trying to squeeze something like art out of the inflexible music industry.

Much has already been made of how Hal Wilner, credited as a co-producer, pushed aside most of Williams’ regulars for a new assortment of backing pros. There’s no doubt the songs here have a marvelous, shimmering sound — soft, almost ambient — that rewards the use of headphones. Wilner has let Williams’ country touches slip away while pulling out too-brief flashes of rock muscle. Williams’ singular cracked voice — a thing of rough Southern beauty — is framed for maximum dramatic effect.

So it’s kind of a letdown that West opens with three mid-tempo numbers and threatens to turn off listeners right off the bat. The first, “Are You Alright,” the best of the trio, is a naked and evocative plea for a lost love. But “Learning How To Live” is stretched too thin in its running time of over five minutes.

“Fancy Funeral,” Williams’ chilling but clear-eyed description of the physical and emotional price of burying a loved one (reportedly Williams’ recently deceased mother), is an instant classic that rights the ship. The brooding atmosphere of “Unsuffer Me” matches the darkness that Williams evokes when she sings, “Come into my world of loneliness, of wickedness, of bitterness.” “Come On,” where Williams spits insults at a clumsy lover, practically jumps out of the speakers.

In the past, Williams would have shaved off three or four songs from West and tightened up the others — and delayed the release date by two years. If we have to suffer through some sloppiness to hear more of Williams’ songs sooner, that’s an easy price to pay and an easy choice to make. Bring ’em on. — Werner Trieschmann

Grade: B+