The battle scars of Richard Buckner’s voice may never soothe the Starbucks crowd, but that doesn’t mean his music doesn’t go down easy. The swirling, pretty songs of Meadow are made for recent Buckner converts and continue the return to form he started with Dents And Shells two years back.
His vocal tremors and spooky internal dialogue are ready-made to make songs disappear as they have during periodic live shows featuring only Buckner and his guitar. Meadow, however, is a band-oriented album, with instant melodies and insistent double guitar action that unfolds with new revelations at every sudden curve.
The similarity to his major-label days of the mid-1990s is partly due to a reunion with J.D. Foster, the producer of bookend albums Devotion + Doubt and Since. Foster counters Buckner’s natural somber tendencies by stressing slow-burning momentum and guitar work that responds to his voice a few steps behind before rising up at great heights to take the lead. The result is that the songs never lag; even in the gentlest moments, there is a driving force to get to the other side.
Nine out of the ten tracks bear one-word titles, yet the ideas behind them are not so succinct. Buckner’s lyrics are muscular, but as upbeat and straightforward as a Beckett one-act. Uncertainty and fracture dominate (“Everyone’s talking as they’re falling,” he sings); still, their delivery is seamless, with the help of Waco Brothers drummer Steve Goulding and Guided By Voices alums Doug Gillard and Kevin March. Honeyed guitars bob and weave during the rock standouts, and even during the meditative fingerpicking, the blur of Buckner’s words glows with clarity.