Buck Meek - The Mirror: Album Review

Artwork for the buck meek album the mirror

3. 5 starsss

If both the premise and set up sound complicated , what emerges from Buck Meek’s new album is for the most part a simple record which lyrically explores love, relationships and other matters of trust.

We live in a world of cyclical hysteria, but even by modern standards the commentary applied to Big Thief’s last album Double Infinity was something to behold.

Delivered to universal rapture, the love for it was so unqualified that a right-wing columnist was even moved to post something designed to butt up against what doubtless he saw as the liberal bubble zeitgeist.

Was this unprecedented, we asked ourselves? Nah, three months later the whole process started all over again for Geese’s Getting Killed.

The time must’ve felt right for Buck Meek to escape some of the idiocrasy by releasing a solo album.

It’s not a one-off thing; The Mirror is his fourth all told and second on the hugely respected 4AD label.

Of it, the ambitions were intricate, such that it, ‘Doesn’t seek to know but to ask, looking to the shape of a question rather than the illusion of its answer’.

Statements like that make cynics twitchy, suspicions that are unlikely to be doused by the presence of James Krivchenia in the producer’s booth and Big Thief compadre Adrianne Lenker.

Other contributors amongst a studio-filling cast included Meek’s brother Dylan, and harpist Mary Lattimore, whilst recording took place at his log cabin studio, Ringo Bingo.

If both the premise and set up sound complicated, what emerges is for the most part a simple record which lyrically explores love, relationships and other matters of trust with a playful sense of questioning.

Opener Gasoline hustles quaintly, tumbling drums and impatient acoustic guitar plugging into something that isn’t folk, or even country, but not of the city either.

Meek, voice twanging gently for his part, mines the runaway vibe by anticipating the thrill to come, nervously asking himself: “Will it be me/Or will it be her/To say I love you first?”

In a world of opposites, Can I Mend It? finds the singer well past the first flush of romance and into damage limitation.

With a toy-like synth effect in the background emulating words lost that should be taken back, the morning is a bad place to be after, ‘Last night I lost my temper/And punched a wall/Can I make it whole/Now that you’ve seen the dark side of my soul?’.

Meek has his peers, of a fashion – Mac De Marco and MJ Lenderman on adjacent paths, if not the same one – but The Mirror, despite its economy of movement, has ample layering.

Heart In The Mirror, for instance, explores the anxiety of performance and expectation, a dainty keyboard line backing up a hard to miss jab at those who harass from the sidelines:

“Many years I’ve lived/In fear of bullies and critics/now I know the thing they loathe is/seeing their own fear in the mirror.”

With Krivchenia it seems beginning and ending his work by hitting record, there’s a DIY charm to songs like Ring Of Fire (which seems, if only tangentially, related in sentiment to its famous namesake) and Worms, with its poetry recital introduction, brush soft snare and latterly jagged guitar solo that sounds it’s on loan from another song.

Of the many episodes plucked from deep introspection, the most vivid is found on Demon, probably the most orthodox track in its slacker charm, but where the singer has trained his inner devil to read and write, making it useful.

Closer Outta Body meanwhile has an elfin touch, one bathed in a flickering light from a source never identified.

In a world where rhapsody and condemnation are one and the same thing, on The Mirror Buck Meek proves that a middle way is possible.

There’s no map necessary – just bring your open mind.