Album: Richard Buckner

Richard Buckner's four previous albums somehow slipped under my radar, an indication, perhaps, of the difficulties that fringe talents experience in securing adequate promotion and distribution in the UK. Impasse only appears here via a distribution hook-up with the French label Fargo. Accompanied by his wife Penny Jo, whose drumming has the appealing naive propulsion of the Velvets' Mo Tucker, Buckner overdubs tints of primitive organ, piano and vibes atop his rhythm guitar, while his wavery voice lends a bleak, folksy poignancy to the melodies. It's hard to pick out individual tracks, as the lyrics are presented as a single piece of prose. Some songs start mid-sentence, their opening phrases used as titles, many left hanging by incomplete punctuation, such as track four, "(loaded @ the wrong door,". This implies that the album should be taken as a poetic flux, outlining in a free-verse stream of images the bumpy passage of a relationship. The results are often virtually impermeable – try figuring out "(a year ahead)...& a light is crushin' through, going out & flying ('Down so soon?'). A ripple in the stares is reining, too (the 'passed' was played (it smoked & stayed!).)." But perhaps they offer an accurate representation of the way in which thoughts and memories drift and collide. So, although Impasse lasts a mere 33 minutes, it's infinitely more rewarding than most albums twice its length.