On his most recent albums, Dents and Shells and Meadow, Richard Buckner minted a mature style that can be understood, in various ways, as enveloping. Whether taking on folk, power-pop, country, rock, or gently experimental drones, he produces uniformly gleaming, misty enigmas. He intones elusive lyrics in a smeared voice, artfully skirting the subject. We see windows and phones, highways and fields, charged with potency like crime scene photos. Mercurial, emotional abstractions stand in for stories, rendered with the telegraphic flicker of dreams, and flat, unmoored syntax in search of some missing referent. The music is translucent and pervasive, gathering like twilight.
Buckner's pointedly elliptical style is so refined that it suggests disembodiment, as if he'd simply atomized himself into song. With these reissues of three earlier, out-of-print albums, Merge reintroduces to us a more Earth-bound Buckner-- not to mention some of his most beloved tunes. All three are seeded with the idiosyncrasies that would increase in his music over time, and they clarify his developmental through-line from Bloomed to Meadow: His songwriting skewed toward sturdy or ephemeral extremes; his lyrics floated into the ether; his music thickened up, leveled out, and rolled over him like a wave.
In 1994, Buckner made his solo debut as a mysteriously bent country musician. At the time, he was living in San Francisco and getting nowhere with his band, the Doubters. He decamped for Lubbock, Tex., to record Bloomed with Lloyd Maines. A sense of urgency simply to get the songs out attends the album's loose, impassioned performances and pithy arrangements-- most highlight vocals and acoustic guitar, sometimes with minimal percussion, electric guitar, or strings. In some ways, it's a traditional outsider-country record in the lineage of Townes Van Zandt. Buckner's voice is all honey and oak, his guitar style elaborately twanging, his constant subject matter heartache. The past tense of the title is not rhetorical: He spins webs of memories, confessions, and creeds around the moment the bloom came off.
But already, there are signs that Buckner is not your average country singer. His phrasing is distinctly off-kilter, speeding up and slowing down, getting louder and softer, pinching and soaring according to the cadence of inspiration. The narrative lines frequently white out, go hazy. This is a world where phones "pour blue," where "never" has a sound and "lust" a taste. And the songs are difficult to frame with pat emotions-- they're alloyed and moody, like weather. On the indelible "Rainsquall" he equivocates, "And when the blue breaks through/ Honey, I'll still want you/ And when the storm moves on/ Dear, I might be gone." On choruses his broad croon often slips into compact melisma, stacking stridencies and sonorities in tight, beveled packets. Spanish guitar runs spurt out of nowhere. Overall, the music seems modeled upon campfires, guttering and glowing according to vagaries of the wind.
Tucked near the end of Bloomed is "Emma", a rare story-song amid all the painterly abstraction. It shows off Buckner's gift for sharp, mythologizing characterization straight out of Cormac McCarthy: A young bride runs from a "black-hatted man with a weed in his mouth" unleashed by her spurned husband, a "Cherokee City man with cold, cruel hands and jealous eyes." This sort of character-driven song comes to the fore on The Hill, which is based on Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a series of soliloquies delivered by the dead citizens of a semi-fictional town. In 1996, Buckner recorded The Hill while taking a break from recording Devotion + Doubt, but didn't do anything with it until the tape surfaced in his truck four years later. With a guitar, an E-bow, and a keyboard, he entered the studio with Calexico's Joey Burns and John Convertino, but forbade them any traditional percussion. Burns played cello, and Convertino improvised percussion from things around the studio.
The resultant music is raucous and immediate, with many chorus-less songs abruptly slamming into one another, yet the songs feel more rigorously interpreted than on the meandering Bloomed. The sound is thicker, more assertive. Chiming, well-built pop-rock arrangements, coasting keyboards, and hard-bitten blues unknot Buckner's writing, and the vocal melodies are expressed less erratically. It works best as a formal exercise, as he winds up subjugating some of his tics to the form-- in this context, his lyrics are naturally less impressionistic-- and the numerous, interstitial instrumentals mean we get fewer actual songs. (These instrumentals include a droney opening piece that predicts later efforts like "Charmers".) It's less essential than Bloomed, but contains some full-bodied Buckner classics like "Elizabeth Childers" and "Johnnie Sayre".
2002's Impasse is the most immediately accessible record of the bunch, combining the lucid, energetic arrangements of The Hill with the arcane personal lyricism of Bloomed. Opener "Grace-I'd-Said-I'd-Known" resounds with Bucknerisms: the humbly majestic acoustic guitar strumming in, the weary fanfare of the singing, the lyrics describing the symptoms of an unnamed-- perhaps unnamable-- ache. Each song is titled by its own first line, making the tracklist an impromptu poem that demonstrates how Buckner's lyrics are at once self-sufficient and infinitely interchangeable: Seldom has he written a line that doesn't address itself to a fundamental sense of lapsed grace. If it's not as revelatory as Bloomed, it's just as enjoyable, and represents our last glimpse of early Buckner, at the peak of his pop-rock powers, before he slipped behind the seductive veils of Dents and Shells and Meadow, which, like Bloomed, could be only his.
