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*** Mary Chapin Carpenter

TIME*SEX*LOVE

(Columbia)

It’s tempting to call Mary Chapin Carpenter’s rst album in three years her equivalent to Lucinda Williams’s Essence. The songs are darker, slower, and more introspective than anything Carpenter’s done before, and they don’t have a lot to do with country music — especially not the polished Nashville country that’s served her well in the past. But it’s a braver step for Carpenter, who’s built much of her career on hit singles. Only two tracks on this 71-minute album sound like possible hits, and neither is up with her best: “This Is Me Leaving You” sounds too much like “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” revisited, and the midlife crisis on “Simple Life” is clever but a little pat.

The rest of Time*Sex*Loveýdeals with the loss of all three of the quantities in the album title. Carpenter displays her usual air for putting deep meaning into concise lines like “You took something that felt so good/And crushed it because you could.” The tunes are less hooky but more haunting than usual, bringing in non-country elements like electric sitar and, on “Slave to the Beauty,” a string octet that’s perfect for the obsessive lyric. But the main difference between this and Williams’s album is that the latter ends on an unusually bitter note with “Broken Butter ies,” whereas Carpenter offers a trio of songs (including the unlisted “Coming Home”) that provide a bit of transcendence. Carpenter has the more stable personality, but an equally wise and complex one.

— Brett Milano