I'm capable as anybody of early work-sentimentality, privileging the verve of the first album over the polished craft of the eighth, but not with Richard Buckner. Some artists build upon their sensibility over time, while some refine it in search of its essence. Buckner is the latter, and it's startling to revisit his 1994 debut, Bloomed, and be reminded how much he's changed. The raw twang and declarative simplicity of Buckner's debut marked it as a clear emanation of the folk tradition. While it had flashes of the singularity that would gradually emerge in his work, it lacked modern Buckner's melodic focus and lyrical depth, with a folksy emphasis on immediacy over poise.
But Richard Buckner doesn't play folk music anymore. After Bloomed, he set about dismantling the idiom, closing in on something gnomic and self-contained, with no clear connection to any tradition outside of its own. Meadow picks up where his 2004 Merge bow Dents and Shells left off-- amid icy pianos and warm swirls of electric guitar. The songs are melodically portentous (whipped into fine froths by GBV alums Doug Gillard and Kevin March); sung in a gruff yet honeyed voice so enveloping that it feels more like a place you go than a sound you hear. The lyrics are dense with subjectivity, attaching one hallucinatory image to another by obscure but inflexible dream logic. Buckner proffers up little bouquets of ambiguous pronouns and verbs that, petal by petal, are almost without content. It's in the total garland, the relationships between the colors and shapes, that meaning emerges.
The elliptical on-the-lam song "Town", where Buckner's voice skids over crashing waves of guitar, is a perfect example of the tense instrumental/vocal interface and compelling inscrutability that mark his modern style. There's an elusive "it" that scuttles off every time you think you've drawn a bead on it; there's a one-sided dialogue with an unknown interlocutor; there're clusters of self-negating language circling the unspeakable; and most of all, there's a sense of glittering stasis and temporal inflation, as if this one infinitesimal instant has become a recursive loop Buckner's trying to sing his way out of: "Last night the rain just wouldn't fall," he sings, pregnant drops trembling in midair.
The gritty drive of "Window" is as anxious as its lyrical noir, something namelessly sinister seething in lines like "Darling, you won't forget/ Standing out of frame" and "Aren't you cold/ Standing by my window/ Curtained up and closed?": Frames within frames, regressing infinitely. If it all sounds intangible, that's because it is, and all the better for it -- where Buckner used to tell, now he shows. He doesn't do metaphors, working instead with the raw stuff of perception to illuminate the contours of a particular shape in the dark, the back-story flowing in spectrally behind vivid innuendo, all in an attempt to thwart his cultivated inertia and, as he sings amid the gently panning snares and pulsing guitars of "Kingdom", "Clear the door/ To another room."
