RICHARD BUCKNER
Devotion & Doubt
MCA

by Peter Blackstock

In the liner notes to Devotion & Doubt, Richard Buckner says he originally wrote "Song Of 27", the album’s final track, "as a theme of sorts for an album I wanted to make based on my own family’s characters. I abandoned the project due to the overuse of expletives."

It’s just as well. Instead, Devotion & Doubt ended up being about whatever you want it to be. It can be about a trip across the country, across time, across your soul. It can be about the slow and painful process of going crazy, or the equally slow and painful process of going sane again. It can be about the one that got away, or the one that still remains, or the one that never showed up.

To me, it’s mostly something I can smell. That’s what I remember vividly, about that moment, that place, that feeling. In the faint glow of the hours approaching the dawn – not dusk, but the darkness leading just to the edge of it – that smell still hangs in the air, returning all semblance of reality to a reckoning point. There were brightest highs and bleakest lows, and it happened so fast that sometimes I wonder if it even happened at all. And then I hear "Song Of 27" and understand all too well that, yes, it was me in that moving picture, though the flickering projector now casts an empty light upon the wall, the film long since finished, the tape going click-click-click as it spins off the reel, the definitive sound of "over". And yet there is that smell, lingering, haunting, confirming, that even the endings really have no end.

Brushes dragged lazily in a circle upon a snare. Echoes of a fading voice as it backs away from the mike on the last line. The resolute twang of acoustic guitar strings nudged, strummed, caressed, buzzed. Salty tears running down the russet neck of a steel guitar. Crickets cutting through the silence of Arizona, whir-buzzing a rhythm track to the desert moon. Strains of an accordion – pushing, pulling, leading, retreating, wanting, waning.

"If I had your little two-time figure close just one last time…"

"Never tell them where it hurts/Keep your bullet safe inside."

"Now all I want is just a little nothin’ more."

Ah yes, the words. Don’t come looking for logic and linear thinking, they are not welcome here. Nor verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus. Nor promises, proclamations, declarations or divinations. All that remains, once the paint has peeled away, is devotion, and doubt.

But words, without sound, are mere skeletons. It’s the voice that brings Buckner’s music to flesh; he is, above all else, a singer. It’s a smooth, melodious croon, by nature, but imbued with such a warm, bittersweet darkness that the sound seems to ooze from the speakers in richly layered browntones with every careful cadence.

"I saw such light in you," he wails on "Fater", to the accompaniment of absolutely nothing, save the betrayed despair of one left behind as the other leaves and travels well. "Of course I’ll choke/Of course I’ll fire," is his guarantee in "Pull", as his voice does just that. "Do you want smoke or just a spark?" is the mystery of "Roll", delivered in a deathly hushed whisper that would serve to fan the flame.

And then there’s "Little Wallet Picture", a snapshot from 1985, a day never to be forgotten, and a vision of a highway that winds alongside the boundaries of the imagination, heat mirages reflecting off the asphalt for miles and miles of desert floor. "This stretch of 99 takes so many lives, and one of them was mine."

Last night I dreamed I was driving down the wrong side of the road on 99 and got slammed head-on by a pickup truck. I have no idea what that means, but somehow my subconsciousness insisted it had something to do with Townes Van Zandt. Then again, Richard Buckner has been known to introduce his song "22" as a song he wrote after listening to too much Townes. So maybe the ghost was just making the rounds last night. "Here in the house of spirits there’s a ghost with a drink," Buckner confirms in the record’s opening moments.

To be sure, ghosts are all over Devotion & Doubt. Ghosts of highways, postcards and cool-ass shows. Ghosts of 4 a.m., of Kate Rose and Polly, of a goodbye rye. Ghosts of sleepy little dreamers and weepy little ragers. Ghosts of images etched indelibly in the corners of the mind, of souls trapped forever on a single slab of silver-laced film.

"Underspent, and too young too/I stumbled onto a picture of you." But there are no little wallet pictures to trigger that lingering memory. Only the smell remains…

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SON VOLT
Straightaways
Warner Bros.

by Grant Alden

Jay Farrar’s voice hits like raw coffee on an empty stomach. It cuts into things – the night usually – with plain force and unkind certainty. He does not write songs to put you at your ease, and if perchance they inspire in the listener an impulse to harmonize, that can only be because you, too, are driving through sparse headlights drumming on the steering wheel.

Straightaways, then, offers ten new, spare, simple songs. They are presented with a minimum of fuss, as unvarnished at Farrar’s voice, and as unaffected.

Unaffected by all that’s gone on since he quietly and without evident fanfare released Trace, unaffected by the subsequent accolades, unaffected by real or imagined competition with his former collaborator, unaffected by whatever kind of pigeonhole this magazine (and others) might unintentionally have created for a real or imagined subgenre of popular music.

Indeed, the surprise is how utterly unchanged Straightaways finds Farrar. His seems to be a singular and internal kind of rootless restlessness (I am reminded somehow of Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge), and one begins to suspect that he will or could produce several handfuls of records that will all be close kin over the next few decades.

That Farrar continues to invite a three-piece band (still drummer Mike Heidorn and the brothers Boquist; Brian Paulson produces again) to accompany these songs speaks of infinite trust, so great is the intimacy with which he approaches the microphone in the sanctity of the studio. He relationship to the words is quite naturally different, and less revealing, on tour.

Revealing is a relative matter with Farrar, of course. Many popular artists seek desperately to reveal themselves, or a fervently imagined vision thereof, through their work. Not him. In interviews he speaks in simple, tight phrases, almost haiku; he’s not intentionally unhelpful, but long years seem to have accustomed Farrar to reducing thoughts to hard nuggets. One wonders, indeed, what impulse leads him to sharing his songs, and whether one day he will withdraw, Glen Gould-like.

At any rate, one begins with Farrar’s voice because it is inevitably the sound of things that settles into the stomach first, and then – maybe – the words. Certainly it was the sound of Farrar’s voice, his unmistakably road-weary tone of dawn-hunting solitude, grease, smoke, and neon that made Trace an arresting debut.

Two years of traveling and playing together have made Son Volt an even more complementary ensemble to that compositional and singing voice. The musicians fit together like an old married couple, and as wisely leave plenty of space. They play with more certainty, with trust. And Straightaways is, as the printed explanation handed to early listeners suggests (Farrar is everywhere a man of few and well-chosen words), a continuation of Trace.

The rest is mostly commerce.

Accustomed now to the sound and sensibility of Farrar’s voice, Straightaways is less striking than its predecessor. The shock is gone, the rawness now familiar. It does not often approach the ebullient blues of Son Volt’s Del Reeves cover from Rig Rock Deluxe, "Lookin’ at the World Through a Windshield". (And one wonders, though it’s hard to hear in the song, if "No More Parades" is meant for an homage to the Phil Ochs song of the same name.) No chorus seems so immediately captivating as Trace’s opening "Windfall", though "Creosote" has much the same flavor. "Been Set Free", a kind of murder ballad ("My life’s been a burden/And I’m going home") is stunning and sad.

Stunning and sad, well, there’s a lot of that. So much so that the concluding "Way Down Watson" seems almost the coda to a song cycle.

That is, Straightaways seems on first blush unlikely to attract the attention of radio. (But, then, it was a surprise to hear traces of Trace over the airwaves…) Because its ambitions are less transparent, and its approach so spartan, one immediately expects a critical backlash.

Yeah, well, whatever.

The last words here belong to Mr. Farrar. They’re as close to the center of Straightaways as I can find. For the rest, you will be well rewarded by your own investigation into the matter.

"Born under widespread changes
The search for higher reason
Learning the ropes okay
Fate just runs you around."
– "Creosote"

JAYHAWKS
Sound Of Lies
American

by Peter Blackstock

The situation is eerily similar, when you think about it. Both bands formed in the mid-’80s in the Midwest and had co-leaders who generally wrote separately yet shared songwriting credits on all their material. Both drew caringly from the deep well of country music’s legacy, though their day-to-day existences were firmly rooted in the American indie-rock underground. Both put out four records before one of the co-leaders split, with the rest of the band rallying behind the one who remained.

We’re talking about Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks, and what’s happening with the latter band right now is a near carbon-copy of what the former went through a couple years ago. About the only significant difference is that the Jayhawks decided to keep the same band name after the departure of founder Mark Olson; but we’ll deal with that later.

First, the music. Sound Of Lies marks the Jayhawks’ full-fledged flight from their country music ties – which is precisely what was expected, given that recent albums found Olson staying closer to the band’s low-key, tradition-grounded past (like Tupelo’s Jay Farrar) while Louris was reaching for broader, more grandiose horizons (like Tupelo’s Jeff Tweedy). Just as Wilco’s Being There was Tweedy’s redirection of his own identity toward the rock ’n’ roll that was closest to his soul, Sound Of Lies is Gary Louris’ assertion that his heart ultimately bleeds pop.

But Louris’ departure is even more dramatically apparent. Whereas Tweedy still peppered Being There with a few country-folk ditties, Sound Of Lies leaves nary a trace of rootsy residue in its wake. The keyboards of Karen Grotberg are given a much more prominent role: Piano the first thing you hear as "The Man Who Loved Life" opens the album, and a gentle blend of piano and organ accompanies Louris’ voice and acoustic guitar as the tender title track closes it out. All four band members – Louris, Grotberg, bassist Marc Perlman and drummer Tim O’Reagan – contribute vocals and/or backing vocals (as does pop svengali Matthew Sweet). The occasional contributions of the Geraldine Fibbers’ Jessy Green on violin are most certainly along classical bloodlines, rather than hoedowns sawed forth from the instrument’s country cousin, the fiddle.

And then there are the songs – eight written by Louris, two co-written by Louris and Perlman, and one penned by O’Reagan. It was clear from such stunningly brilliant gems as "Settled Down Like Rain" on 1992’s Hollywood Town Hall and "I’d Run Away" on 1994’s Tomorrow The Green Grass that Louris had a rare gift for compelling melodies and chord progression. What lay untested was whether he could crank out more than a couple such tunes an album.

Sound Of Lies answers that question with an emphatic yes. "The Man Who Loved Life" is an epic opening salvo, with Grotberg’s majestic piano intro giving way to Louris’ luring couplet "Won’t you take my hand, won’t you be my friend/Take my advice, go away," the waves presently breaking into a cascading crescendo of meshing guitar and violin strings, richly layered with soaring harmony vocals, anchored by a driving rhythm section. "Think About It" is basically an extension of the first track, the second movement of a sonic suite that defines the band’s lofty ambitions from the outset.

Other songs reflect different colors of Louris’ pop prism. "It’s Up To You" and "Haywire" have an easygoing, folk-rock feel; "Poor Little Fish" bounces along amidst swirls of sweetly psychedelic production; "Big Star" is an anthemic, cheerful rocker that recalls the group’s cover of Grand Funk’s "Bad Time" from Tomorrow The Green Grass. The rhythmic urgency of "Dying On The Vine" shows the recent pop experiments of Joe Henry, who the Jayhawks once guided toward a more country direction, in turn influencing his former backing band’s work. And it’s nearly impossible to discuss the breathtaking twists and turns of "Sixteen Down" without mentioning the Electric Light Orchestra – although I swear I mean that as a compliment.

All of which ultimately reinvents the Jayhawks as a completely new band – which begs a return to the issue of the group’s name. Shortly after Olson’s departure, Louris affirmed that while he and the other Jayhawks would forge ahead without Olson, they would also be changing the group’s name (just as Tweedy and the remaining Tupeloers had rechristened themselves as Wilco). "That’s probably not the smartest business move," Louris told Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer Jon Bream in January 1996. "But we owe it to our fans and to Mark to move on."

The reversal of that decision smacks of a record label, manager, lawyer, perhaps the band members themselves, trying to justify a mistake. Retaining the name may indeed help to avoid confusion, and there are those who would argue that what the band is called really doesn’t matter. Granted, it’s not the most important thing in the world. But it does matter.

All reasons of morals, business and politics inside, it matters most because of the music. Whereas previous Jayhawks records represented the distinctly recognizable meld of the visions of Olson and Louris, Sound Of Lies is something remarkably, refreshingly different. These Jayhawks would still smell as sweet, by any other name.

TOWNES VAN ZANDT
The Highway Kind
Sugar Hill

Released on the heels of Sugar Hill’s reissue of Rear View Mirror, this album isn’t the best place to start with Townes, but it’s a fitting way to end. Mixing live performances of some of Van Zandt’s bleaker material with studio covers in a similar vein, The Highway Kind is the troubadour’s equivalent of Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night, a musical meditation on lost highways and dark nights of the soul.

Where Guy Clark’s version of "Dublin Blues" has a hint of deadpan humor to it, Van Zandt’s is shaky and scary, barely together. The legacy of Hank Williams has rarely sounded so poignantly ravaged as on Van Zandt’s readings of "Lost Highway" and "Lonesome Whistle", while "Wreck On The Highway" reinforces a similar mood and theme.

As revelatory as such expressions of musical kinship may be, Van Zandt’s original material remains a singular achievement, from the fatalistic couplet that opens the album – "Well there ain’t much that I ain’t tried/Fast livin’, slow suicide’’ – to the verse from the title cut that hits as hard, deep and true as any song could:

I don’t know too much for true
My heart knows how to pound
My legs know how to love someone
My voice knows how to sound
Shame that it ain’t enough
Shame that it is a shame
Follow the circle down
Where would you be?’’

Between the allegory of hell on earth that is "The Hole" and the metaphysical bargaining with eternity on "No Deal", the selection of material would have been representatively powerful if Van Zandt were still alive to sing it, but has even greater resonance in the wake of his death. The song cycle concludes in the drunken haze of Peter La Farge’s "Ira Hayes", followed by one of Van Zandt’s incomparably cornball jokes, which here provides an enlightening perspective on the musical darkness that has preceded. Within the cosmic joke of existence, as illuminated through Van Zandt’s artistry, the setup is that we’re all in this together; the punchline is that we’re each so very much alone.

– DON MCLEESE