Music
Surrounded
As he's proved over a record-making career that came into full bloom on 1997's Devotion + Doubt, Buckner is a folk-style modernist with an intoxicating tenor and an abstractly heart-wrenching sense of poetics – think of his style as emotional psychedelia. This potent set reveals some of his writing technique, or seems to: nine spare songs about buried dreams and dug-up memories apparently carved out of a sheet of prose (included with the CD), edits highlighted. The self-produced LP swirls drones and uncharacteristic electronics behind evanescent imagery. That it's hard to grasp just makes it more seductive.