'Honey' is too sweet for its own good

Lucinda Williams

Little Honey (Lost Highway)

ESSENTIAL "Wishes Were Horses"

"Little Honey" is the first album that makes you wonder whether less Lucinda might be better Lucinda. After releasing only five records over the first two decades of her career, Williams picked up the pace with her 1998 breakthrough, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." She's since issued roughly the same number of studio albums in half the time, and on "Little Honey," which is released next Tuesday, the results sound rushed. Coming after last year's "West," a saturnine work informed by the death of her mother and the end of a relationship, "Little Honey" finds Williams rebounding from those losses. She brims with "Tears of Joy" and declares her discovery of "Real Love" - trite titles indicative of songs whose lyrics are as uninspired. "You squeeze my peaches," Williams sings in an over-mannered drawl that stretches both her sex metaphors and our patience. On "Honey Bee," she actually says, "Now I got your honey all over my tummy." Just as overripe is her duet with an equally over-mannered Elvis Costello on "Jailhouse Tears." And could she really think of no better way to describe a downpour than "it's raining cats and dogs" on "Circles and X's"? For an artist whose reputation for painstaking perfectionism and poetic acumen is legendary, "Little Honey" is too much saccharine and not enough substance. [Jonathan Perry]

Lucinda Williams performs at the Orpheum Theatre tomorrow night. Tickets are $35 and $39.50 at www.ticketmaster.com or 617-931-2000.