Desert spell

Lucinda Williams resorts to heavy-handed crudeness | Arsenio Orteza

Associated Press/Photo by Robert E. Klein

Since her breakthrough in 1998 with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams has developed a reputation for having too much talent and taste to make a bad record. Little Honey (Lost Highway), however, finds both her talent and her taste in rather short supply.

Or maybe it's just her energy level. For most of Little Honey, Williams sounds hung over, groaning and slurring about the frailty of the flesh as if her own were stretched to the breaking point. While such brokenness reinforces the skeletal poignancy of the vertically yearning "Heaven Blues" and the horizontally acute "Rarity," it nearly undoes "Tears of Joy" and "Jailhouse Tears," which, for all their crying, evoke not rivers but deserts.