Lucinda Williams – Good Souls Better Angels
Highway 20/Thirty Tigers – Out Now
Reunited with producer Ray Kennedy for the first time since her 1998 breakthrough Car Wheels On A Gravel Road album, Lucinda Williams also revisits her formative gritty Delta blues roots and their often biblical imagery for an album that positively seethes and which, recorded with her touring band of guitarist Stuart Mathis, bassist David Sutton, and drummer Butch Norton, also marks the first time husband/manager Tom Overby has been credited as co-writer.
There are no autobiographical reflections here, rather, topical and spitting fire; it’s flooded with political anger but also veined with themes of perseverance, resilience and hope, opening with the defiant You Can’t Rule Me riding a loose-limbed vibrating swampy bassline and slide guitar as she snarls “I got a right to talk about what I see” and that “the game is fixed it’s plain to see/But I ain’t playin’ no more”.
The guitar reverberating slink of the slurred Bad News Blues is a list song, enumerating everywhere it’s found (newspapers, TV, at the bar, and even “all over my clothes”) as she asks who you’re going to believe, “liars and lunatics/fools and thieves/clowns and hypocrites”. And then, featuring almost shoegaze guitar lines and slide, we get to the Dylan meets Ride narcotic Man Without A Soul which, while never mentioning names, is undoubtedly an invective directed at Trump, “a man without truth, a man of greed, a man of hate, a man of envy and doubt”, Mathis twice taking off into Crazy Horse guitar solo territory as you can only hope that her prediction that “it’s not a matter of how, it’s just a matter of when/’cause it’s coming down” holds true.
By contrast, Big Black Train has a minimalist, repetitive lyric about depression set to a slow, resigned and weary country melody before the bass throbs back in on Wakin’ Up, a song about escaping domestic abuse (“he pulled my hair and then he kicks on me/Next thing, I swear/ He wants to kiss on me”) driven by a strobe-like rhythm and chainsaw guitar in an almost late 60s psychedelic blues style.
Sung in a breathy rasp, the strings-accompanied, furtive gothic prowl of Pray The Devil Back To Hell most directly draws on Robert Johnson imagery and could be seen as a thematic companion coach of that Big Black Train, but most certainly seems to address mental issues in the lines “behind these walls/There used to be a spark/But now the devil calls”.
From here, the slow-paced, muted six-minute Shadows & Doubts turns attention to a quick to judge social media led society and how so-called friends “set out to surround you” as you suddenly go from icon to pariah regardless of whether evidence exists or not, then keeping the musical mood fairly low key with puttering brushed drums, delicate keyboard trills, pedal steel and ruminative guitar, When The Way Gets Dark is a call to not give in and give up “when all the rivers have run dry” as she sings “Take my hand/You’re not alone.”
But then it’s back to a more ferocious mode with the punk-blues coloured Bone of Contention with its intermittent stabbing guitar bursts and Williams snarling out the minimal venomous lyrics like Patti Smith wrestling with Grace Jones, building to even more brutalist riffery with a transformed cover of Greg Garing’s Down Past The Bottom and from there into more low slung reverberating bass lines for the inexorable steamrollering leviathan rhythm of Big Rotator, an end of days vision with God presiding over the churn of souls and John the Revelator up on the mountain top calling an end to a world where “liars are venerated, losers congratulated/Cheaters celebrated, thieves compensated/Vultures satiated, murderers exonerated/Guilty vindicated, innocent incarcerated”.
Finally, it ends with the seven-minute plus (almost) title track prayer of Good Souls, an almost Van Morrison-like slow waltz invocation to “Keep me with all of those/who help me find strength/when I’m feeling weak”, in the hands and hearts of the saints and better angels who keep the light shining in the darkness. To which one can only say Amen. A new benchmark in her 40 years career, when it comes down to saving arseholes or good souls, the album is very clear on how the scales should be balanced.
Photo Credit: Danny Clinch