In the Time of Gods

Dar Williams has been torn between her folkie instincts and the guilty pleasures of pop music just as long as she's divided her songs between smart and often witty character studies and explicitly activist political material, and 19 years after she made her first album, 2012's In the Time of Gods confirms all of this is still the case.

In the Time of Gods’s backstory is ultimately incidental to what works and what doesn’t about the album.

For an album that, in the words of its creator, boasts “an epic setting” and that draws upon Greek mythology in order to explore contemporary...