Richard Buckner, The Hill - 34m 14s

Tracks & Durations

1. The Hill

34:12

Note: The information about this album is acquired from the publicly available resources and we are not responsible for their accuracy.

Review

This is a strange, wholly original album, and it places Richard Buckner at the vanguard of, well, something, and it's entirely Buckner-esque. On The Hill Buckner sets to music passages from poet Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology. On previous outings his lyrics were as powerfully rendered as poetry, so at first it seems odd that he would rely on another's words. But the way Buckner bites, chews, and swallows the round vowels and hard consonant stops of Master's Midwest narratives, the voices resonate with fresh import. The music is powerfully original as well. Buckner's arrangements are organic to the voices and poems. The music clangs and shudders like an old jalopy then settles into a hushed wind-like whisper, Buckner's deep voice finding melody in the ebb and flow of the language. Even stranger is that The Hill is one continuous track--there are sections and movements and suites and passages, but it all flows like one continuous story. Few albums are this complex, evocative, and stunning. The Hill is Buckner's tour de force. --Tod NelsonCourageous, threatening, and often splendid in its brooding poetry, The Hill is like no record you've ever heard. Buckner fuses 18 poems from Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology--an early 20th-century collection based on the tortured memories of the dead of a fictional Illinois town--into one long, spiraling descent into the dark corners of the human condition. There's anguish, violence, betrayal, and a lot of death here, but also some riveting, savagely original music. Buckner orchestrates his droning guitars and phantasmal keyboards with Calexico's bass, cello, and percussion. Like the themes, the music is somber but somehow opulent and graceful, often profoundly spiritual. Through it all Buckner's hoarse, glowering moan redeems these lost hunters, rounders, wives, and mothers. "In death therefore I am avenged," Buckner wails in the a cappella "Ollie McGee." In this demanding, hieratic epic, so too is Richard Buckner. --Roy Kasten

Other Versions

Albums are mined from the various public resources and can be actually the same but different in the tracks length only. We are keeping all versions now.

The Hill

Tracks: 1, Disk length: 34m 4s (-1m 50s)

The Hill

Tracks: 18 (+17 tracks), Disk length: 34m 4s (-1m 50s)

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