(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
San Francisco-based singer-songwriter
Richard Buckner
debuted in 1994 with an album entirely reissued on Bloomed (Dejadisc, 1995 - Slow River, 1999) and a style inspired by the "outlaw" country of Texas, specifically that of Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. Acoustic guitar, steel guitar, and mandolin accompany his autumnal ballads. Buckner's voice is a fragile combination of Townes Van Zandt and Neil Young. The sound is perhaps overly indebted to the country style that was fashionable in those years.
Buckner earned well-deserved fame with his second album, a concept work about the divorce that had just branded him with fire. On Devotion And Doubt (MCA, 1997), accompanied by Giant Sand and Marc Ribot, Buckner serves up a handful of spectral ballads in the form of love letters (Figure above all). His monologues are dark and paranoid, like those of the gloomiest Neil Young. The music is even more subdued and introverted. Only A Goodbye Rye foreshadows, for the first time, a less introverted future.
Continuing from that song, Since (MCA, 1998), with John McEntire on drums and Dave Schramm on guitar, is a bit less depressed than its predecessors. The better-arranged songsnot so much the thunderous Believer as Jewelbomb (reminiscent of Warren Zevon), Goner w/Souvenir (a bit like Fleetwood Mac), and Coursed (somewhat like Soul Asylum)are not necessarily better than the acoustic gems Ocean Cliff Clearing and Raze, featuring barely-stroked guitar and a lone voice recounting its own solitude. The sorrowful blues of Boys The Night Will Bury You and the funereal Once that closes the album summarize the philosophical treatise that this record represents. But perhaps the modest arrangement of Lucky Buzz (with Dave Grubbs on harmonium) is most representative of Buckner's musicality. The record oscillates between two extremes, undecided whether to venture into the world of melodic rock or to retreat like a hedgehog into the world of the country singer-songwriter. What emerges is a cryptic, dark, schizoid work.
Buckner is one of the great intimist singers of rock music, capable of opening his heart (and his life) with blinding clarity.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
The concept album
The Hill (Overcoat, 2000) sets to music some of the poems in
Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology".
Buckner, now relocated in Canada, composed a ghostly soundtrack to that
ghostly poem, nine songs and nine instrumentals that seem to play from Dante's
Inferno.
Impasse (Overcoat, 2002) marks a return to form.
Heartfelt and heartbreaking, Buckner's music always seems constrained by the
medium, as he sticks to the format of the ballad that has been passed on to him
by countless generations of singer-songwriters. His stories would probably
benefit from looser structure and arrangements.
Dents And Shells (Merge, 2004),
the first album since Since to boast a real backing band,
and, like that album and unlike the two in between, not a concept album,
presents the veteran Richard Buckner as a talented but insecure artist.
The lack of a unifying theme seems to take away some of his acquired strengths
as a storyteller.
It sounds first and foremost like an experiment in instrumental arrangement.
Meadow (Merge, 2007) largely succeeds where Dents And Shells
failed or merely tried. Buckner crafts charming arrangements for his melancholy
visions, finding an unlikely balance of folk music and dream-pop.
Especially effective are the melodies (another significant improvement over
the predecessor), lending the proceedings a ghostly and noir ambience.
