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Review: 'BUCKNER, RICHARD'
'Our Blood'   

-  Label: 'Decor Records'
-  Genre: 'Alt/Country' -  Release Date: '26th September 2011'

Our Rating:
Of all the Alt.Country singer-songwriters, Richard Buckner is the one artist I come back to time and time again.

He is one of those rare artists whose voice and words speak to me without a filter.

The raw intensity to his songs makes most other singer- songwriters seem superficial and affected.

The power of his records never fades and it has always amazed me that he remains a cult figure, being unjustly overshadowed by precocious talents like Ryan Adams or, more recently, by the melodic melancholy of Bon Iver.

Ironically, Iver, in other words Justin Vernon, has recently gone on record as hailing Buckner as having a "big influence" on his work.

If such endorsements mean that he reaches a wider audience, some long overdue form of justice will be done.

Astonishingly, Our Blood is Buckner's first album to be released on a UK label (in the US it is released one month sooner on Merge Records).

It is his ninth album and, sadly, I fear may be largely ignored by the masses like all his others.

This is not because it is a substandard record, far from it, but because his songs continue to make so few concessions with material derived from some deep dark places that not all listeners want to go to.

We're not talking here about some abstract notion of heartache or fashionable melancholy; these songs are drawn from felt emotions and lived pain. Buckner doesn't do happy or carefree.

The record follows a silence of five years since his last album, Meadow. In the interim there have been a catalogue of misfortunes.

There was an abandoned score to a movie that never happened, a couple of broken tape machines, a stolen laptop which contained precious mixes and, most bizarrely of all, something about a headless corpse in a burned-out car near Brooklyn. Fortunately, the latter had nothing to do with Buckner although it gives a flavour of some of the desperate straits he seems to find himself in.

The album was recorded at home with contributions from veteran pedal steel player Buddy Cage, and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley.

All nine songs have one word titles and the arrangements are simple, as though the content has been deliberately stripped back to its most basic elements.

Titles like Escape - Thief - Collusion - Witness - Gang suggest a theme of crime and punishment but there is no obvious linear narrative to connect the tracks.

Buckner says: "Our Blood is about being caught, armed with some barbed momentary reasoning that won't let you go. If there is a story, it will end where it began and then keep going, but never knowing why it should".

One the best tracks, Confession ends with the line "I guess I'm the one they warned you about, within, without" and if I were to try to summarise the mood of the record as a whole, I'd say that it has a brooding menace. This derives either from something that has already happened or is about the happen.

In saying that, the poetry of the songs does not lend itself to neat summarising. The words should be savoured as much for mystery as for meaning. On Hindsight, for example, we have the enigmatic imagery from lines such as: "Stricken as we stood /Broken as we made time for make-believe / Stealing when we should/ What we couldn't give away".

In early 2012, Buckner is scheduled to do some dates with Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine whose stated opinion is that Our Blood is his best album yet. It is not that, but it is still good enough to be a contender as album of the year.

If you buy it as you should, and love it as you must, I'd recommend back tracking to three of his surefire classics like his remarkable debut Bloomed, The Hill a stunning song cycle based on the Spoon River anthology of poems by Edgar Lee Masters and, perhaps best of all, the sublime Devotion And Doubt.

Our Blood itself merely confirms once more that Richard Buckner is the real deal and it is good to hear he is still desolate after all these years.

Richard Buckner's official website
  author: Martin Raybould

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BUCKNER, RICHARD - Our Blood