The defining quote of Richard Buckner's early days, as woebegone
country songsmith, was this slogan he happily repeated: "Why do people
go to auto races? They want to see a good wreck." Scattering the
shattered fragments of his broken heart, rending his ventricles apart,
and laying all his insides out, Buckner's first forays into recording
were car-crash love songs; his debut longplayer, 1995's Bloomed,
juxtaposed the mingled limbs of lovers with the wreckage of his own
marriage. When he followed it up with the astonishing Devotion + Doubt
in 1997, Buckner was widely hailed as the blood-and-guts troubadour
adding heart-and-soul to the nascent no-depression movement of the
alt-country day. Yet, the years since haven't been so kind, finding
Buckner making a mess of messy records, never coming close to
recapturing the same glories that he did in his early days, from the
overly-considered, rockist tones of 1998's Since, to the strange curio
of 2000's concept record The Hill, to the dense home-made
multi-trackings of 2002's Impasse. Over the years, Buckner's woeful
persona has gone from heartbroken to curmudgeonly, the churlish
songsmith now a grizzled give-a-shit figure who's lost any and all of
the romanticism he once used to be able to funnel into his music.
Dents and Shells might be Buckner's most clean, straightforward delivery
since Devotion + Doubt, but it's not quite time to proclaim the career
renaissance just yet. Recorded in Calexico's home digs in Tucson,
Arizona, the record finds Buckner getting out of his own head for the
first time in years, presiding over a band who treat his songs with sensitivity,
coloring drums and guitars and analog organs around the driving strums and gravelly
croons fore'er at the center. Songwise,
Buckner tries to straighten up by keeping things short and sweet — the
disc totals 10 tracks and 35 minutes — but he's still essentially
wandering his way through intuitive tunes. Having long forsaken
standard forms of verse and chorus, or even hook and line, here he sets
his increasingly syntactic lyrics — which, as with Impasse, are
(re-)printed in very specific, poetic form on the artwork, suggesting
that they come first with the pen — to a set of tunes blessed with
melody but hardly immediately memorable. Such songs tend to be most
striking when he reduces, not just in length but in rhythm and delivery;
the back-to-back pairing of single-idea songs "Rafters" (two-fifty of
highway driving and relationship-angst-in-obtuse-imagery) and "Picture
Day" (two minutes of mandolin strumming and the most melodious vocal on
the album) shows the album in its best shades.
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