If it wasn't already apparent, Richard Buckner's sixth album, Dents and Shells, drives the point home: The man is nearly immutable. With the exception of his forays into folk-rock (Since and Impasse), Buckner's evolution has been judicious and purposeful. His debut, the 1994 classic Bloomed, was a palimpsest of ornate gray graphite sketches, and on subsequent albums he's put his collar up against the wind and trudged deeper into the chilly, murky recesses of his aesthetic. Since that first album, Buckner has created increasingly more ephemeral, impressionistic gradations of tone and mood. Dents and Shells continues to explore Buckner's shadowy continent of song, a Symbolist mirror-world where bright glints of detail fleetingly flash, then submerge, cloaked in shifting fogs.
Dents and Shells is Buckner in top form, using a broad brush to manifest his enigmatic poetics, hallucinatory atmospheres, and melodies that appear and evaporate like breath exhaled onto cold glass. The vanishing drone and epic percussive sweep (provided by ex-Butthole Surfer King Coffey) of "Charmers", and the hushed, ramshackle clatter of "As the Waves Will Always Roll" ably demonstrate this singer-as-condensation sensibility.
While strongly rooted in classic folk, Buckner's songs are rendered pristinely strange by their smallness and smeariness-- they're vast, dim topographies described by chords that are barely there, recondite realms of visions and visitations. Buckner is the disembodied Eye roving freely within impossible spaces, cataloging impressionistic signatures through a hazy lens. But it's not all simmer and seethe: Buckner's more ponderous tunes are leavened with lovely pop ballads like "Her", a sturdy platform of guitar decorated with a twinkling, frugal piano from which he calls out "to nothing, in the wake of watching her sipping wine from a camping cup on some missing night."
Superficially, Dents and Shells trods the well-worn folk paths of heartache and loss, but its lingering impression is more aligned with the elegant and darkly compelling logic of math. Most shapes found in nature have mathematical counterparts, and the shifting, complex patterns of Buckner's lyrics and guitar work peel back the surfaces to reveal the numbers underpinning everything. In this sub-world, the sky is a grid, the stars are vertices, the horizon of a distant shore is an x-axis, and the shells dotting it are the spiraling integers of the Fibonacci Sequence. On "A Chance Counsel"-- a classically Buckner confection of gleaming chords and drawled warbling-- he sings: "Let's hear the outline," and later, "listen at a number on the door." To hear the outlines, the fraught spaces between tangible objects or discernible thoughts, is what Buckner teaches us to do. By listening at the numbers, he upturns the precise shells of logic and reveals dents in the sand that contain the mysteries skirting the outlines of natural law.
By now, Buckner is so far inside his vision that one fails to really see him-- the man sinks beneath all the swirling phantoms, the inscrutable blocks of coded image, and the eddying currents of blurry atmosphere he's summoned up around him. By the same token, one wonders if he can see out anymore. His increasingly esoteric songs suggest that the musical cocoon he's been spinning around himself for a decade deflects his sight inward again and again. Regardless, it's this very sense of hermetic isolation-- and of a person's consciousness not creating music, but actually becoming it-- that makes each Buckner album feel like a fresh adventure in a recurring dream: No matter how well you know the landscape, its topography remains amorphous and impossible to chart.
