To help commemorate the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Merge is re-releasing Richard Buckner’s 2000 album The Hill, which used Masters’ work as source material. Masters wrote more than 250 poems that were graveyard monologues, small-town Midwesterners revealing, after death, their grievances and recriminations with angry honesty. Buckner took a handful of them to use as lyrics—or inspirations for instrumentals—and the result was one of his best records.
Backed by Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico—who also worked with Buckner on 1997’s Devotion + Doubt (another Buckner highlight)—the album is full of unsettling, empathetic and poignant portraits. “Child, death is better than life,” claims one character, and Buckner resurrects Masters’ words and makes them persuasive. As always, Buckner’s voice has an inconsistent relationship with pitch, and here he sounds ancient, as if he himself could be singing from beyond the grave.
—Steve Klinge
