**** Richard Buckner

DEVOTION & DOUBT

(MCA)

Buckner's precise palette features shades of dusk, dawn, and darkness under stoic Western skies. In the folk-blues spirit, he enriches his spare arrangements with lyric and melodic images that bespeak his maturity as a storyteller. Another long night prompts a fireside cowboy's testimony to the loneliness of barren plains. But earlier, in "Lil Wallet Picture," Buckner defines a woman's beauty in the same stark landscape. In a world of basement windows, beaten ghosts, braids come undone, and flooded backroads all under an indifferent moon that inspires tight-lipped poetry, you can feel the hunkered-down toughness of Buckner's roadside witness.

Taken all together the songs tell a story. "A Goodbye Rye" picks up where the moody reflective "Home" left off, celebrating the same open road elsewhere lamented by an ensemble of fiddle, banjo, acoustic guitar, and steel pedal that quotes the modest hook in "Picture." By the time you reach the brilliant conversation between "On Traveling" and "Song of 27," you're in the presence of a master craftsman whose artistry triumphs under that "bruised and fallen sky" he's embraced as his condition.

-- Craig Thorn