Williams ‘channels’ her anger into song
Lucinda Williams, “Good Souls, Better Angels” (Highway 20/Thirty Tigers) Lucinda Williams has come up with an album for our times — at least if you’re as angry as she is.
“Good Souls, Better Angels” is anything but subtle. Williams takes on “fools and thieves and clowns and hypocrites” — and that’s just on one song, “Bad News Blues.”
Oh, and she gets after the devil, too. And President Donald Trump, in “Man Without a Soul.”
That song’s hook isn’t especially clever, and the politics aren’t for everybody. The starring role, though, goes to Williams’ spectacular band. Guitarist Stuart Mathis, bassist David Sutton and drummer Butch Norton jam out as Williams repeatedly shouts, “It’s coming down.” Comparisons are risky, but the playing evokes Neil Young of “Like a Hurricane” vintage.
It’s fiery, righteous and emphatic, like the soundtrack to someone leaving a murder scene. Williams is less blunt on “Big Black Train,” a song about depression, and “Wakin’ Up,” which touches on domestic violence. Even then, it’s the band that elevates an ordinary hook — “I’m waking up from a bad dream” — to something more.
The mellower cuts are more constructive. On “When the Way Gets Dark,” the band matches the unsettled mood of Williams’ languid, encouraging vocals. On “Good Souls,” a gorgeous prayer of a song, Williams recaptures the Velvet Undergroundinfluenced magic she harnessed a few years ago with her cover of J.J. Cale’s “Magnolia.”
Superlatives can be tricky with new music. Sometimes you have to let it sink in a little, see how it holds up over time. You might be left to wonder later what everybody was so mad about.
The bet here, though, is that Williams and her band have captured the spirit of the moment. Not everyone will see things as she does, but no one will miss the point.
Nina Simone, “Fodder On My Wings” (Verve/
UMe)
Nina Simone’s “Fodder On My Wings” is an album of contrasts and extremes — personal traumas and world sounds, joy and despair, harmony and defiance, the carnal and the spiritual.
Recorded in Paris in 1982, as Simone’s enduring restlessness and creeping mental illness kept her life seemingly barely tethered to anything but her music, it’s a considerable triumph of personality and genius.
The album opens with the gleeful “I Sing Just To Know That I’m Alive,” a horn-filled tune in which Simone bids farewell to the year gone by while fondly recalling Trinidad, one of the many places — Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands among them — where she lived after leaving the US in the early 1970s.
“Fodder In Her Wings” appears to depersonalize the album title, but the references to self are clear and the weariness deeply intimate — “fodder in her wings” and “dust inside her brains” as “she flitted here and there.” With an African-inspired introduction ceding to harpsichord and piano, her worlds appear together but separate. “Oh, how sad” — indeed.
The repetitive, direct approach of “Vous etes seuls, mais je désire etre avec vous” — You are alone, but I want to be with you — leaves no room for doubt, while “Il y a un baume à Gilead” and “Heaven Belongs To You” are the spiritual expressions in the equation
“Liberian Calypso” is another sparkling composition recounting a carefree night of dancing, followed in brutal contrast by one of the bonus tracks, a bitter yet stately reworking of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” more depressing even that the original.
Narrating her father’s agonizing death, it rails against bad but lasting marriages, betrayals and childhood deceptions, yet includes a most understandable lament: “I loved him then and I loved him still/That’s why my heart’s so broken.”
The string of ups and downs continues with another horn-driven dancefloor filler — the caustic and empowering “I Was Just a Stupid Dog to Them,” which claims that “now everything will change.”
At the end, the brief “Stop” and the even briefer “They Took My Hand” are in playful, Mose Allison mode, the former undressing the tragedy of “Send In the Clowns” and the latter a rollicking Bob Marley salute.
“Fodder On My Wings” is not an album for casual listeners or day trippers but one which shows how clearly Simone could fold her inescapable anguish and raw honesty into her art. M. Ward,“Migration Stories” (Anti- Records) The borders delineating M. Ward’s “Migration Stories” come in terrestrial and celestial forms, with songs inspired by his grandfather’s journey from Mexico and California earthquakes, as well as family reunions taking place in other dimensions.
Recorded principally in Quebec with members and collaborators of Arcade Fire, the collection began as largely instrumental ballads, mostly hushed moods occasionally linked by similar themes or visions.
Ward, whose career also has included roles in supergroup Monsters of Folk and — with Zooey Deschanel — in She & Him, filters reality through poetry, dreams and humane science fiction, alternating looks through grounded telescopes and microscopes in orbit.
“Unreal City,” referencing a dream about a “continental shake” and “the final tidal wave,” has the album’s nimblest rhythms and sunny backing vocals, tuning our satellite radio to the Soothing Sounds of the ’70s channel amid the calamity.
Opener “Migration of Souls,” with striking vocals from Irish duo The Lost Brothers, has a transcendent focus, while its sister track, “Heaven’s Nail and Hammer,” echoes the atmosphere of the Cowboy Junkies at their most delicate. “Coyote Mary’s Traveling Show” sounds like the result of a fragile Sun Records session.
Ward considers “Chamber Music” and “Torch,” another exception in its sprightliness, also to be connected, and says that while he can’t reveal the poem that may have transformed guitar instrumental “Stevens’ Snow Man,” the words “may be useful in the middle of a drought or winter or pandemic.” If we only knew.