"Pretty destroyed/comin' through/sees your spin/around the room...are you sitting down?" These are some of the lyrics from Town, the opening track on Richard Buckner's Meadow, sung to an urgent progression of distorted electric and acoustic guitars and drums. As unsettling as this is, the song is chock-full of Buckner's inherent melodic sense, and it's easier to bear, somehow, this darkness and melancholy. Produced by J.D. Foster at his home studio, and at Buckner's, with some additional work done at Brooklyn Recording, this is an album of absences, of ghosts so far down the highway only their traces remain. Buckner's sense of rock roll is infused with images from country, folk, the desert, the blues, early American popular music; virtually everywhere he's been. In some ways one can say that these ten songs are his own companion to his recording of some of the -Spoon River Anthology on Hill. Each track here has a one word title except for the final one, The Tether and the Tie. But Buckner's revisiting the cautious grief and optimism on Bloomed, too. Everything here is written in a state of absence, of the previous, the past, and how it can be reconciled. The gorgeous shimmering piano, drums and guitars intro on Lucky ease into the startling words: "Forgetting where the roads align, bowing out and back again/Something made it over/A chance to cross the shards you see...." These lyrics are held together by bridges and refrains that further underscore their poetry. Its strength is in the missing middle, the hole in the middle, the thing that needs to be revisited but can't quite be because it's already gone and only gray shadows remain.

1		Town
2		Canyon
3		Lucky
4		Mile
5		Before
6		Window
7		Kingdom
8		Numbered
9		Spell
10		The Tether and the Tie

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