For someone who excels in tell-it-like-it-is storytelling, Lucinda Williams has certainly become a mystery.
Williams follows her 1999 comeback/breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, with Essence, a slow, tense album whose cup of spiritual imagery runneth over. But with all the album's references and metaphors, it's a little unclear whose word she's proclaiming.
When she rips into "Get Right with God," which is a cross between a fundamentalist anthem and a snake-charmin', washboard-music-makin' revival, she gives both the serpents and God Almighty equal time. The CD cover booklet contains tense, voodoo-esque images: loudly colored grave flowers; two corpses locked in an embrace; a fence-post cross stuck in the middle of swampy farmland with "Get Right with God" written in paint.
Has Williams, whose songs have always been as Southern as sweet tea, traded the Bible Belt for the Voodoo doll to fuel her muse?
Who knows for sure. But like Voodoo, an emotionally-charged, wildly spiritual energy pervades Essence. Direct and frightening in its honesty, the album wails about larger-than-life emotions -
