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Little Honey finds Williams in celebratory mode, with raucous rock, bluesy testimonies and tongue-in-cheek twang.
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Williams spent much of this decade proving she can branch out, but here she's staged something even more impressive: a pleasing homecoming.
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With Little Honey, she pays back fans whose faith had waned as her songwriting grew pedantic on recent albums such as "West."
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There's a raw energy on Little Honey--which arrives this week, a little more than a year after 2007's "West"--that's as refreshing as it is palpable.
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Williams and Elvis Costello get their twang on for the spirited 'Jailhouse Tears,' and a combination of new elements (horns) and powerhouse playing by her touring band Buick 6 bolster the set's emotional heft.
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While it shows that the 55-year-old barbed-wire country singer is wary of rock's trappings, Little Honey proves she's still crushed out on the music.
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The result is her finest record since "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," the decade-old masterpiece by which her career will always be judged.
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Little Honey is a heartening and humble album, sufficiently smart and aware to be an expression of thanks for the journey as well as the destination.
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Little Honey is easily Williams' least depressing album in years, which doesn't sound like much of a compliment until you consider that she sounds downright happy on some of these tunes for the first time in, well, maybe ever.
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Lucinda Williams provides instruction for those who feel fucked around and fobbed off at 40-something.
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'Real Love' is the first of a number of raucous tracks on the very good, though a tad uneven, Little Honey.
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So while there are a few more missteps here than we’re used to seeing from our beloved Lucinda, for the most part, her music has survived that awful, awful curse of falling in love.
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Despite the metaphysical yet conversational “Knowing” and a sexed-up title track that begins with his come in her hair, she doesn’t offer enough evidence that her new love is any realer than all the others she’s exulted and struggled through in eight albums going back to 1979.
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With Little Honey Williams has once again assured her fanbase that she is incapable of releasing an album that is anything less than collection-worthy and wholly listenable.
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And though those positive vibes yield some correspondingly fun tunes, the disc feels a bit underwritten at times.