Richard Buckner

In the early 1990s, Richard Buckner detached himself from his longtime band, the Buckets, to become one of alt-country's rising stars. Although steeped in traditional country and old-timey lore, Buckner opted for a spacey folk sound closer to Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen. A major label contract with MCA resulted in two finely wrought albums, wherein the twangy auteur honed his uniquely bleak and eminently uncommercial style, gaining critical praise and a devoted cadre of fans before returning to smaller-scale projects. Throughout, Buckner's artistic persona was guarded and dense, his poetic aspirations both inscrutable and overreaching. Often, you couldn't tell what the heck the guy was talking about, but it sure sounded intense.

Buckner's last record, 2000's The Hill, was his most coherent and most highbrow, laden with poetic pretensions. The album's literary bent wasn't surprising since it was an adaptation of Edgar Lee Master's turn-of-the-century novel Spoon River Anthology, itself a work of dark Americana that collected obituaries and character sketches from a fictional Midwestern backwater that seemed unusually prone to death by stick thwacking and skull bashing.

While the singer-songwriter's fifth album, Impasse, is as cohesive melodically as The Hill was thematically, it's lighter in tone and much more listenable. It's the kind of record that succeeds first on musical terms, seamlessly playing through to an end that comes too soon. While still lyrically impenetrable, Impasse is pleasant and inviting, as Buckner loosens up both musically and existentially, settling into a dreamy indie-rock soundscape that melds a quavering, cheap-sounding electric organ with skillfully placed acoustic ornamentation. Lyrically, Buckner mitigates his typical suppressed sense of recrimination and dread, content to settle for ironic self-knowledge rather than bitter, apocalyptic horror.

Seeming to sing from a wealth of hard-won experience, Buckner still addresses his listeners one at a time, in a first-person voice that commands attention. But what his narrator wants from the reproached is never quite clear. Perhaps for now it's enough to enjoy the music as it washes past the stony shores; you can worry about the shipwrecks later.