Since
With his deep, gently blurred voice and wandering minor-chord songs, Buckner has created his most intensely beautiful and evocative album withSince. He's taken the spare sounds and textures ofDevotion + Doubt, a record lauded by many but heard by few, and draped them behind a dense sonic scrim. In the past Buckner has relied on his voice to carry the hefty emotional freight of his lyrics of loss and desperation, but here, with a band that includes, in Buckner's words, "all the musicians I dreamed of recording with," he is free to liberate his baritone, and it slips and slides wonderfully throughout. There's an exuberance here; his subject matter hasn't changed, but he attacks it with an enthusiastic bombast. The songs are crammed right up against each other, and the lyrics are a cavalcade of paired alliteration ("horsey and the hopper", "brief and boundless", "twiced and townless"), oft-repeated favorite words (razed,faith,floor,rain,moon,li'l), and huge emotions hidden in small acts. It's a murky dream Buckner wanders; his opaque poetry suggests more than explains. It's hard to get a handle on exactly what is going on with such lines as "If I ever leave this 10-day room / I'll send my shallow ground to you." But the songs hit you--hard--just the same.--Tod Nelson