Lucinda Williams: Good Souls, Better Angels

- It's forty-one years since Lucinda Williams released her debut album, twenty-two since she enjoyed a career renaissance with the country rock masterpiece Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. But the sixty-seven-year-old is back with Good Souls, Better Angels - a new album that sounds right at home in 2020.

Sonically, the album is mostly dirty blues rock: long songs that at times build up to epic conclusions, or at times brood with repetitive, noisy paranoia like on Wakin' Up. Some of the highlights, however, are still the country-style ballads, though it has to be said Lucinda's worn voice is quite a different instrument from that of her younger self.

Even as a younger woman, she always had the country singer's eye for heartbreak and tragedy, but Good Souls, Better Angels; despite its positive sounding title, seems to focus not just on individual moments of sadness but an overarching, existential dread. Bad news everywhere, depression, doubts, authoritarian politics, dark forces. As one lyric goes, "These are the dark blue days, that much is true/and there's so many ways to crush you".

Man Without A Soul seems to be about Trump, but it could be any one of many current political figures. It could be Harvey Weinstein or other men called out by the #metoo movement, could be corporate CEOs, could be fossil fuel lobbyists driving us towards extinction.

It makes sense that the devil appears a few times in the album's lyrics then. He is of course a familiar figure in the blues and country tradition that Lucinda is channelling, but he also represents a ubiquitous, malevolent spirit that would seem to explain a lot about our current times.

Music that comes out of oppressed cultures often plays with these tropes because, whether celebrating or mourning, it could express that ultimately, human agency is limited. We have some control over our lives that we can use for good or bad, but we also exist in an interrelated world of unjust systems, of mysterious forces beyond our control. The image towards the end of this album of God as a Big Rotator is another archetype drawn on to illustrate this.

Still, that song also uses the image of the defiant prophet on the mountain with justice as his motivation. That then segues into the album's closing title track. "Keep me with all those who help me find strength when I'm helpless," it sings, "Who guide me along and help me stay strong".

With the perspective of almost seven decades on earth and with the help of musical traditions that go back much further, Lucinda Williams has made an album ripe for our times. It identifies the darkness around us, but still sees the potential for human love and courage to make a difference for the better. it's an old message, delivered in an old medium, but it seems strangely relevant to a world grappling with unseen forces in 2020.

- Andy Paine.