Skip to main content

Buck Meek - Two Saviors (2021)

Buck Meek - Two Saviors

Big Thief has only been around for five years or so, but in that short time frontwoman, Adrianne Lenker has built the band into one of the most consistently astonishing groups playing today, while simultaneously dividing her time between maintaining an almost equally great solo career. Her bandmate and ex-husband Buck Meek, often offers backing vocals and guitar to those Big Thief projects but has expectedly, been consistently outshined by Lenker. In that respect this solo outing serves its purpose: after hearing the difference between Lenker’s solo material and Big Thief’s discography, Meek’s Two Saviors helps fill in the gaps.

As with many solo stints, Meek keeps things casual, focusing on his songwriting, singing, and guitar work instead of broader album theatrics. The sound is homespun, with a breezy pace that evokes the charm of a demo reel without sacrificing quality production and song structure. This is best exemplified by “Two Moons (morning)” a thrown-together late-album follow-up to the earlier track, “Two Moons” proper. This fun, country-tinged romp is strung together with musician chatter and a more light-hearted arrangement that, along with Meek’s delivery evokes an entirely different mood. 

While Meek uses this album as a showcase for his personality and musical prowess, he’s not afraid to draw lineage to his work with Big Thief. “Candle” co-written by Lenker, could easily have appeared as an outtake from either one of the group’s last two albums and features easily the most memorable chorus on Two Saviors. But while “Candle” works as a great example of what a Meek fronted-Big Thief could sound like, “Pareidolia” is front-loaded to typify the ideal Meek country-tinged solo album-sound. Lighter and more optimistic than most Big Thief songs, “Pareidolia” flexes Meek’s unique inflection and evocative songwriting, to mark the strongest entry on the album and the distinction between Meek and his home band.

A member of one of the most critically acclaimed groups of the twenty-first century, Buck Meek may not have needed his album to live up to the highs of Adrianne Lenker’s Songs and Instrumentals but Meek did need to define himself as more than just a hired hand on those Big Thief projects. Two Saviors works as a proper introduction to a musician who has been toiling away behind the scenes of a truly great band, but also as a completely independent opening statement from a talented artist in his own right. It’s likely that Meek’s solo material will never be evaluated separately from his work with Big Thief, but on Two Saviors Meek, at the very least, proves that it should.

~7.0

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert Review: Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23

Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23 Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood was once the center of the city’s booming entertainment district. Located at what had initially been the end of the L Train system, The Aragon Ballroom, Green Mill Jazz Club, and long-defunct Uptown Theatre quickly defined the corners of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the designated area for Chicagoans to congregate for the arts. As the area’s zeitgeist waivered though, the theatres grew into a weekend oasis of vibrancy amongst an otherwise casual and sleepy north-side neighborhood. Given Wilco’s consistent championing of Chicago’s local institutions, and another Uptown landmark Carol’s Pub in particular, The Rivera Theater seems like exactly the kind of venue for the band to host their latest three-night run and the start of their spring tour. Jeff Tweedy and company know the former movie palace well, playing there many times over the years and even using it as the base for a five-night series of performances b
Post a Comment
Read more

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain (2023)

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain   Big Thief, one of the best and most adept bands of the 21 st century, has done more in six short years than most bands can squeeze out of an entire catalog. Each of their five studio albums has managed to expand their signature homespun charm into exciting, self-contained albums. The sound always moves forward but with distinct detours projecting their country-folk and singer-songwriter tendencies over disparate palates. The band’s prolificity extends to their solo catalog as well, the most notable inclusions naturally coming from lead singer and principal songwriter Adrianne Lenker. But behind her eclipsing generational talent, is guitarist Buck Meek, an artist who could easily shepherd his own headlining band if he needed to. Aside from some early, Big Thief-adjacent work, Meek’s true breakout was with 2021’s Two Saviors , a beautiful, alt-country collection of songs, most of which approached the quality, if not the scale of his mother band’s rel
Post a Comment
Read more

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (2023)

Fever Ray – Radical Romantics Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout , an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right. Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensi
Post a Comment
Read more