ALBUM REVIEW: Alex Williams Reckons With His Work in Progress on ‘Waging Peace’
Nick Cristiano
Posted On October 20, 2022
Alex Williams’ debut, Better Than Myself, was one of the best albums of 2017. The Indiana native had the voice, the sound, the swagger, and — most important — the songs to come across as a legitimate modern-day outlaw.
Alex Williams (Courtesy of Lightning Rod Records)
As it turned out, Williams was living too closely to the lyrics of songs such as “Little Too Stoned” and “Week Without a Drink” (“Well, the day’s too long and life’s too short to ride on the wagon”). All those excesses led to a reckoning and a five-year hiatus. Now he’s back, older and wiser, but his music packs the same thrilling kick, with his country sound often delivered with an even harder-rocking edge.
Waging Peace is no standard-issue redemption story. Rather, Williams sounds more like a work in progress. He takes a hard look at himself, and as he puts it on the title track, which begins with acoustic-accented atmospherics before exploding into a big chorus, when he looks deep down, “My only enemy looks a lot like me.” But he never succumbs to self-pity or romanticizes his situation. In fact, he knows how to put his lot in perspective: On “The Struggle,” he sings evenly, “I ain’t never had it better or worse than anyone.” And, addressing an ex-lover in “The Best Thing,” he understands that “My leaving’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”
Williams’ rumbling baritone — part Waylon, part Stapleton — can make him sound “Old Before My Time,” in the words of one song title. (On “The Vice,” the acoustic-textured ballad that closes the album, he refers to himself as “an old soul in a young man’s skin.”) That sense of lived experience lends weight to Williams’ reflections on the push and pull of dark and light that animates a lot of these songs. “One hand on the wheel, one foot in the grave … one half of me is in my prime, the other can’t be saved,” he sings on “Old Before My Time.” In “Rock Bottom,” one of two numbers featuring the moaning harmonica of Mickey Raphael, he wonders: “I don’t know why the darkest roads are the easiest ones to follow.”
If “Fire” is too close to generic hard rock, “Double Nickel” is a blast. A salute to I-55, it’s a breakneck country-rocker that conveys the rush of hurtling down the highway.
“I ain’t sure if I’ve been cursed or I’ve been blessed,” Williams admits in “Confession.” One thing’s for sure: His unsparing honesty in facing up to his demons and continuing musical vitality give new life to the familiar insight at the heart of “The Struggle”: “Ain’t it all about the struggle, ain’t it all about the ride.”
Alex Williams’ Waging Peace is out Oct. 21 on Lightning Rod Records.
