MCA
Richard Buckner, a singer-songwriter from San Francisco who sounds more like he's from West Texas, offers what is perhaps the year's finest album to date with "Devotion + Doubt," a sweet, sorrowful diary of love and longing.
While his fantastic debut album, "Bloomed," featured only Buckner's strong, emotive voice over spare acoustic guitar work and Lloyd Maines' buttery pedal steel, "Devotion + Doubt" broadens the songs' musical palette. Steel-guitar guru Maines returns, joined by Joey Burns, John Convertino and Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, as well as guitarist Marc Ribot. Though Buckner's lyrics remain the focus, the musicians' contributions add further dimensions to the songs.
New musical wrinkles can be found everywhere. The album's first track, "Pull," features the first use of drums on a Buckner song; in "Song of 27," the drums are replaced by a softly jangling key chain for percussion. Buckner plays an antique hand-held chord organ in "On Travelling;" for the a cappella "Fater," the instruments are eschewed altogether in favor of Buckner's rough-hewn vocals that recall nothing so much as old-time Appalachia.
Buckner, whose family moved every few months when he was a child and who has spent the last few years touring almost non-stop, fills his songs with references to the road. And as the title suggests, he explores the demands and difficulties of love, hoping in the album's third track, "Ed's Song," that "for once, devotion is enough."
Through the course of the album's 13 songs, Buckner winds his way down empty highways and dark nights, meditating on midnight skies: "It's a hard moon to swallow ... under this swollen, swampy sky," he laments in "On Travelling."
The record closes with the distance between him and his lover still great, but his devotion has, at least in that moment, overcome his doubt as he sings, "on nights like this my hope returns, though I may be miles away from her."
- Anders Smith-Lindall