For 20 years, Richard Buckner has elusively drifted through alt-country, electric folk, acoustic rock. Over the past decade, he has shrouded his abstract singer/songwriter music with vast, ominously serene arrangements. But no matter which way Buckner tacks, he always contrasts imagery so nonfigurative it seems shaped from vapor with tactile, oaken music. His deep-grained acoustic guitar playing is splintery as a raw plank. His voice is a long gnarled shape with a silky finish, like a sea-polished branch, and gives a roughshod impression that belies its smooth range and secure pitch. Its heaviness is most affecting when it floats vulnerably high to breathe out the merest hints of a narrative, as on "Portrait", one of many gorgeously charged songs on new discography highlight *Surrounded. *
As much as I love the Buckner of early classics such as "Rainsquall", where he beat up his guitar like it owed him money and sang as stridently as a car alarm, I prefer the oracular poise and oceanic atmosphere he cultivated during the mid 2000s on Dents and Shells and Meadow. That's probably why I didn't strongly connect with his arid 2011 comeback Our Blood, which some regarded as a stripped-down return to form. But there were some concrete problems with it, too. Owing to a series of misfortunes, he remade the album twice, and you could tell: it felt threadbare, leached of inspiration. It's hard not to receive the lush, focused Surrounded as a correction. You can hear the difference as soon as you press play, with the title track's acoustic guitar dancing crisply in a full reflective cloud, languid high harmonies pouring over Buckner's dreamiest croon like honey.
Buckner sent off his tracks for mixing to the ubiquitous Tucker Martine as soon as he finished them, to prevent loss and overthinking, and frequently bottled lightning. He used an electric autoharp and an octave pedal to create a stormy, bright-seamed sound profile for the album, with piercing melodies condensed out of dark, sliding layers of pulses and drones. The shaker percussion on the darkly coiled "When You Tell Me How It Is" comes back several times, reinforcing the general sense of something about to strike. "Foundation" sails majestically on sweet, choppy feedback, while the extraordinarily tense "Mood" rumbles on a deep, skipping howl. These are some of the boldest sounds he has ever put forward, and that's before you even get to "Cut", where the golden crests of his voice ride on what sounds like a sultry trance-gated organ.
As one-of-a-kind lyricists go, Buckner is the least quotable ever. He uses the plainest language to obscure rather than clarify, slowly unspooling long, slippery clauses that linger tantalizingly on the threshold of resolution."It seems like you're there," he sings, "as someone removed/ and left in their place/ with nothing to do." There would be nothing exceptional about this careful, evocative blankness if he didn't maintain it over the course of the album. It feels like one large, refracted thought, always just out of focal range, which almost comes clear on the dusky and powerful conclusion "Lean-To", with its uncommonly sharp-edged images of dying stars breaking windows and bodies swinging from rafters in the dark.
The liner notes reveal that these lyrics are drawn from one continuous prose text; the most substantial foray into a mode Buckner previously explored on Since and Impasse. The printed lyrics are embedded with extra text in red, which alters the implications of the sung words. You can see how he freely breaks lines across sentences to add even more shades to his meaning-- which matters a lot when your meaning is nothing but shades. That sense of loaded omission that defines his lyrics is confidently placed on display, on a record marked by a revivified confidence. Buckner has long been a cherished cult object, fuelled by the devotion of the few (especially the ones at Merge who keep him afloat with that Arcade Fire war chest), but Surrounded is polished and persuasive enough that everyone should give it a try.
