Richard Buckner- Impasse

Label: Merge

Released 2002, Reissued 2017

The words are entrancingly cryptic, as if their simplicity conceals unfathomable depths. The music is sparse, almost whispered at times, like a secret. The title gives everything away, though. During the gestation of his 2002 album Impasse, which will receive a new vinyl pressing from Merge Records on March 31, 2017, Richard Buckner was stuck. But, with perseverance, what began as one of his most troubled recording attempts ended as one of his best and most pivotal-a capstone for his wayfaring early period before he planted roots with Merge. In 1999, Buckner spent a week in a recording studio with a producer and a few other musicians to work on the songs that were supposed to become Impasse, but the session failed. Instead, he went home and recorded The Hill "as a kind of creative catalyst so I could start thinking again, " he says. On it, Buckner sang poems from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology over warm, splintery country-folk, outwardly simple and interiorly ornate. Around the time that The Hill was released in 2000, Buckner was finishing his second pass at Impasse. He was living in a loop, traveling back and forth on temporary work visas between the states and Canada, where he was living at the time. He bought a 24-track digital recorder, an eighties Roland synthesizer, and an Echoplex tape-delay unit then spent the next year tracking in his Alberta basement with a live-in drummer. A sense that he needed to purge the songs and finish the album turned out to be prescient.

Track Listing:

1. Grace-I'd-said-I'd-known:
2. born into giving it up
3. hoping wishers never lose
4. (loaded at the Wrong Door
5. (A Year Ahead)... & a Light
6. Put on What You Wanna
7. A Shift
8. ...& the Clouds've Lied
9. Stumble Down
10. Count Me in on This One
11. Dusty From the Talk
12. Were You Tried and Not as Tough
13. Impasse:
14. I Know What I Knew
15. Stutterstep