Richard Buckner

Richard Buckner’s songs are broad and scraggly and strange, like the state of his birth, California, and just as distinctly American. As the singer himself would be itinerant—Edmonton, Lubbock, Brooklyn—his music would grow in multiple directions, deepening its roots in country, folk, and rock while branching out into E-bowed drones and oceanic ambiance. In the live setting, his gentle experimentalism becomes more pronounced—he’s known to improvise sound collages with a looping pedal, so that the already-hallucinatory songs seem to shimmer apart and reform. His voice, rough and honeyed, is an inviting instrument that makes his lyrics—evanescent wisps of narrative, perspective and insight—swell with quiet profundity.

On his most recent album from North Carolina’s Merge Records, 2006’s Meadow, Buckner was fully settled into his mature style, where incredibly cryptic songs divulge complex emotional experiences. The baleful rocker “Town” circles a catastrophe that is deeply felt, but never named. “Canyon” carves out the merest slivers of time, catching individual raindrops in mid-air. “Window” conjures palpable menace with little more than shadows, empty rooms and a window frame. “Before” beautifully captures the texture of a moment of sweetness aware of its own transience. Buckner gets at the ineffable by hewing to the edge of the unknown, with its disarticulated currents of hope and despair, illogic and intuition.

All we’ve heard from Buckner since is a series of reissues of his earlier albums, which remind us how finely graded his refinement has been. First there was Bloomed, more traditional-sounding than his later work. It seems equally indebted to Townes Van Zandt’s hardscrabble aesthetic and Cormac McCarthy’s fulminating one. But his uniquely personal musicianship and lyricism were already burgeoning. Tempos shift like breezes, offering occasional runs of Spanish guitar. The lyrics are dreamily synesthetic, with colors where there should be sounds, tastes where there should be feelings. This is the hodgepodge Buckner would toy with over several more albums before zeroing in on his mysterious modern style on 2004’s Dents and Shells. With a new record due from Merge sometime this year, we can almost certainly look forward to a sneak peek at his next incarnation. —Brian Howe