These alt-country types are supposed to be storytellers, right? Spinning the everyday into gold and crap like that? Well, if that's the road they drive, Richard Buckner may have finally run into his titular impasse. After documenting the achiness and breakiness of his heart over the course of a number of fine records in the mid-to-late 90s, the San Francisco native switched gears to take on the project of adapting the histories of others (namely, the backwater protagonists of poet Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology). The result, 2000's The Hill, was a glorious, barely cohesive run-on sentence of a record, crammed almost to bursting with narrative detail. Still, even though Buckner did an admirable job of getting into his characters' heads, he was obviously telling other peoples' stories, begging the question: had he run out of his own?
Impasse marks Buckner's return to the first person, as well as a reversion to the blunter rock persona he picked up on 1998's Since and then quickly abandoned in favor of The Hill's sparser acoustics. This shouldn't be (and, for the most part, isn't) a bad thing; as the pop-rockers that kick off the album ("Born Into Giving It Up" and "Hoping Wishers Never Lose") suggest, he's pretty good at it. Still, even between these two songs, the similarities nag-- the same low, metallic guitars clang in the introductions, and the same humming synths wash over the choruses.
It doesn't hurt that a number of pleasant numbers in the same mold (Buckner's wife Penny Jo's drums being the main distinguishing features) show themselves throughout the rest of the album; problem is, these are the best the record has to offer. Buckner's lyrical mode has gone from despairingly particular to optimistically impressionist, which is fine for the more upbeat songs. Without that extra weight, however, the more folky tunes don't hold up so well-- where we once were given a story, start to finish, Buckner now pours out a succession of vague images and emotions, and whenever he decides to cut off his stream of consciousness, it sounds like it's a little too soon. Only the sort of epic, sweeping guitar gestures Buckner applies to "Dusty from the Talk" make it sound complete; the others end up fragmented and premature. And when he tries to do dire, as on "Were You Tried & Not as Tough", it ends up sounding forced, which is awfully disconcerting on a record as unforcedly simple as this one often is.
While Buckner's uniqueness still stems from his gorgeous and clear but deep-as-dirt baritone, his voice also seems complicit in homogenizing these songs. The same twang-tricks seem to pop up over and over again, and, unsupported by sonic variety in the songs themselves, this makes melodies all run together. I mean, they're all nice on their own and everything, but over the course of an album, the effect is of a guy at a party that won't stop telling the same story. With the details excised, the story Impasse tells isn't even that personal anymore. Like a ride through the prairie on a summer day, it's pretty, but about as flat as it gets.
