Lucinda Williams: World Without Tears

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating * * * *)

Madonna isn't the only sexy veteran who's decided to start rapping late in her career.

Lucinda Williams - the long critically feted alt-country singer-songwriter - gets in touch with her inner hip-hopper on a couple of tracks on her latest.

That might sound desperate. But the effect is disarming.

So too is most of the rest of World Without Tears, an album which also manages to be rockier, bluesier, grittier and emotionally more fraught than its immediate predecessors, none of which was exactly short on bittersweet reflections themselves.

The raps come on Sweet Side, a grim but oddly uplifting portrait of an adult damaged by an abusive childhood, and the languid American Dream, a broad-brush mural about life at the bottom of the heap in the US of A.

Elsewhere, Williams and band channel the spirit of Keef on the Stones-ish rocker Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings, and swagger with gothic-blues menace through Atonement.

But if Williams and backers (especially guitarist Doug Pettibone) have their mojo working overtime on those tracks and the likes of Righteously, she still manages many a hurt-so-good ballad about her usual worries - love, lust, loss, loneliness regret, guilt, getting over him.

Among the best is Those Three Days ("Did you love me forever just for those three days"), a song which would give Nick Cave a run for his money for the fine line it traverses between lovelorn and obsessive.

The songs are mostly terrific by themselves, but given the edge of Williams' sleepy, sexy, woozy quavering voice and World Without Tears is an album of major cardiac risk factor: heart-melting tunes, heartbreaking sentiments.

Label: Lost Highway