Lucinda Williams - Little Honey

It oughtn't be surprising that Little Honey is a very solid, consistent album, rich in expressive musicality - this is Lucinda Williams we're talking about, after all. And yet, it has come as something of a surprise, and it's taken me months to really listen to the album, and I think that both are because, for all of its worthiness, it, like West before it, lacks the fluency and lightness that characterised the albums in her great mid-career run, Lucinda Williams, Sweet Old World and, especially, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and which still touched Essence even if to a lesser extent. She's older now, of course, and doing something different - something closer to blues, and to real, earthy rock and roll - but it doesn't speak to me as much as her older stuff did (and still does).