Lucinda Williams' Essence

With 1997's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams finally got the kind of record sales critics had said for years that she deserved. An austere, evocative masterpiece, it established her as a unique songwriter with few peers. Her latest record, Essence, produced by Williams and Austin-based guitarist Charlie Sexton, is a lesser album on several levels, but that's not to say you shouldn't go out and purchase it right now. Williams' talent is not the skittish, mercurial gift of a Neil Young. She's a craftsman, and even her diminished works have the power to draw out undiscovered emotions and name them with relentless efficiency.

The album's first track opens with a simple, repeated line: "Lonely girls, lonely girls, lonely girls." The melody exhales and falls like a sigh, and there they are, in your room, in your mind, rummaging through your sock drawer, everywhere you look while the song plays. Williams has conjured them?lonely girls, everywhere. These forlorn, doe-eyed chimeras are symbols of unrequited love from time immemorial. They shiver and dissolve as Williams moves on to stake her claim apart from their fate in "Steal Your Love": "Did they lay down a law and lock up your heart/I'm gonna have to steal your love/Some laws should be broken from the start/I'm gonna have to steal your love." Unlike, say, Chrissie Hynde's "Brass in Pocket," the song doesn't give the impression of a woman in full possession of her charms, ready to pounce. Williams may end up with the lonely girls after all.

Despair lurks in the darker corners of Essence where Williams' other records merely harbored longing. The title track ferments sweetly melancholic lust into feral craving laced with a junkie's desperation. "I am waiting here for more/I am waiting by your door/I am waiting on your back steps/...I am waiting for your essence/Baby, sweet baby, whisper my name/Shoot your love into my vein/...Baby, sweet baby can't get enough/Please come find me/And help me get fucked up." Two more standout tracks: "Out of Touch" laments an impassable distance between friends. "We speak in the past tense and talk about the weather/Half broken sentences we try to piece together/I ask about an old friend that we both used to know/You said you heard he took his life about five years ago." "Are You Down?" tosses reconciliation out the window: "Can't force the river upstream/When it goes south/Know what I mean?/Nothin' will make me take you back/Are you down babe/Down with that?" Sexton's velvety production and guitar playing, not to mention Reese Wynans' Booker T.-meets-Benmont Tench Hammond B3 work, fill both tracks with Lanois-esque layers of hazy sonic brooding.

While Car Wheels kept persons and places at a healthy distance, maintaining their mystery, Essence rushes right at these icons and deconstructs them. If Car Wheels was Williams' Catholic album, credulous about the power of images, words and places to evoke and even redeem, Essence is the work of a fallen Southern Protestant, finding salvation from a life of darkness in a simple, penitent plea to her creator. "Get Right with God" charges through a swampy gospel rave-up with one foot in a Pentecostal tent revival, the other in a French Quarter blues jam. But Essence's confessional directness is also a weakness. The raw emotions of the title track and "Out of Touch" almost collapse into solipsism. Where Car Wheels' ambiguity invites repeated listens, Essence is at times something of an ordeal, delving so far into Williams' tortured moments that it doesn't come back. And for all its alluring ambient textures, Sexton's production lacks the organic connection to Williams' songs that the sounds on Car Wheels had. Still, taken on its own terms, Essence is simply a document of Williams' frame of mind at a particular moment, a haunting snapshot of her soul?honest, bracing and carefully crafted. We should have expected no less.