Album: Lucinda Williams

The most ubiquitous subject matter in popular music for over a century, love has been chewed over, swallowed and spat out in so many different ways in a million different songs that, like old chewing-gum, it has now all but lost its flavour. Emotion is the essential missing ingredient in nearly all contemporary pop's accounts of love. Naively idealised in pre-teen pop, abandoned by more nihilistic forms, emotion is the ghost that drives pop's machine, and its absence may be the key to pop's diminishing power. Without truth and empathy at its core, a love song is just a hollow shell, a simulacrum of feeling with no real relation to the human condition. For that, one has to look elsewhere, to older forms of country, blues and folk music, and to those modern artists who have most sensitively adapted those forms to illuminate contemporary circumstances: Dylan, Cohen, Joni and, more recently, Lambchop's Kurt Wagner, Will (Bonnie "Prince" Billy) Oldham and Lucinda Williams.

It may be exaggerating slightly to suggest that World without Tears is the most compelling album of love songs since Blood on the Tracks, but it's not far off. It was recorded virtually live with Williams's three-piece band, and there's an immediacy and intimacy about these songs, delivered in her racked, fragile tones, that stings and soothes by turns. Williams has a particular gift for noting the little things that are usually overlooked, whether it's the way nothing conjures up memories as vividly as smells, or the way that old lovers' imperfections, rather than their beauty, stick longest in one's memory: "Your pale skin, your sexy crooked teeth, the trouble you get in, in your clumsy way/ I guess one afternoon you won't cross my mind/ And I'll get over you, over time."

Under the production of Mark Howard, who engineered Dylan's marvellous Time out of Mind, there's an engaging grain and texture to the band's performances here, which range from the heavy blues trudge of "Atonement" to the country rock of "Sweet Side" and "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings". Stuffed with sex and drugs references, the latter is evocative of the great moment when the Stones transformed rock'n'roll by infusing their natural raunch with Gram Parsons' country spirit. Worthy of particular mention is Doug Pettibone, whose vibrato guitar parts add almost unbearable poignancy to several songs. But it's Williams's lyrical sharpness that packs the real punch on World without Tears, nowhere more so than on the title track, in which she considers what life would be like in such an unemotional place: "How would scars find the skin to etch themselves in... How would broken find the bones?" Now that's what I call love.