Prettiest Little Burden: Richard Buckner Carries his Country Music—Roots to Blooms—to Cactus Café

With recent digital reissues of Richard Buckner’s albums Bloomed , The Hill , and Impasse being cause to celebrate his critically acclaimed body of work, the intimate Cactus Café promises an ideal venue in which to experience such a distilled folk sound. The Hill is a conversion of Edgar Lee Masters’ "Spoon River Anthology" to music, rendering the voices of the deceased as detached and universal, yet circumspect and self-contained; this is an apt representation of Buckner’s song writing style overall.

If Buckner’s voice were a wine, it would be heavy with oak, and his instrumentation is also undeniably gnarled with country fundamentals, cutting a swath following the simplest path the way a river does. Yet his vocals resonate with a shimmering, almost phosphorescent quality that rises above the workaday flesh of the very songs they narrate. On first listen, Buckner may blend in with any other talented country artist. But there is a weight and depth to Buckner’s music which belies the sonic droning of a steel guitar as it lends his genre-crossing lyrics a patently Western patina.

Local Americana-crafted Leatherbag will open the Cactus Café show tonight, featuring singer-songwriter Randy Reynolds. His sound bends toward early Dylan and Springsteen, promising a night of authentic folk tailor-made to usher in another of Austin’s fabled summers.