Richard Buckner - Dents and Shells (2004)

With his sixth studio album, the peripatetic songwriter sweetens his sound and his signature evocations of loss, memory, and melancholy. "As a child once," he sings with a vulnerability he's rarely shown, "I almost marked it all; it isn't gone." What he has marked and preserved is a devotion to his forever doubting soul (the record, like 2002's Impasse, was born out of a failed second marriage), to the inexhaustible power of language and subtle sonic invention. With pedal steel, accordion, and mostly acoustic guitars, the mood recalls his most accessible album, Bloomed, but the song structures flash and dart like the whirling sparklers of youth. And behind the implacable acoustic drone, the plangent melodies, the taut drumming (by ex-Butthole Surfer King Coffey), the brimstone lyricism, and his murmured growl, Buckner seems to smile at the wonder of life, love, and imagination. --Roy Kasten