Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears - Australian Tour Edition

A good album, but not speaking to me in the way that Car Wheels and Essence do. I've been listening to it for a couple of weeks now, and while the songwriting and delivery is confident and muscular, the record as a whole doesn't seem to have the indefinable spark that made her last two so great. In some ways, it feels like a bit of a consolidatory recording - it really firmly goes over the terrain that Lucinda had marked on Car Wheels and Essence, further refining and combining the musical ideas she developed on those earlier albums, but lacking any show-stopping individual songs (not that the brilliance of her records has ever really been about individual highlights) or strong sense of difference/distinction from what has come before.