One of the finest albums to be released last year in any genre, on any label, was Richard Buckner's Since. A few critics drooled on themselves and some heady words of praise were penned, but apart from that, life went on as usual. The album had that rare quality that's so uncommon in music of any kind-- it was ephemeral, yet firmly rooted in many traditions. You could see the points where he started from and see the finished product, but not necessarily trace the paths used to get there.

Unfortunately, this masterpiece was released on a relatively unsympathetic major label which gave Buckner very little support in terms of promoting the record. Basically, they let it die. At his recent performance at Seattle's Bumbershoot music festival (which was more like a giant rant against the music industry interspersed with some songs here and there), Buckner introduced a new song with the words, "This is a new song... and it might turn up on a record someday if I ever run across an honest person in the music industry, which should be in about 55 years." Man!

However dubious the future of Buckner's recording career may be, he's seen fit to allow Rykodisc to reissue his excellent first album, Bloomed, with a few extra tracks to sweeten the deal (as if it really needed sweetening). The songs here are more traditional, and more traditionally folk- oriented than much of his later work. The instrumentation is limited to Buckner's raggedly beautiful voice, his surprisingly elegant guitar work and flourishes of pedal steel, fiddle, accordion and the like.

Buckner's poeticism is already in full form here-- check the first lines of "Rainsquall:" "As the rain breaks through the branches/ Along southbound forty-two/ The green I grew left us/ Wet-eyed red and bluebird blue." Throughout the album, Buckner invests these modern folk songs with such personal fire that some of the songs read almost like diary entries and love letters written by some brilliant, half- crazed author. Buckner has the rare ability to pile metaphor on top of metaphor and make it all somehow work out. Take "Gauzy Dress in the Sun," for example, on which he croons, "A gauzy dress in the sun/ And a blue moon bloomed... I thought of you, a lake I drink/ And I turned lazy, hot and meek/ But the well went deeper, dear/ When you brought your water here." Heady stuff, to be sure, but Buckner's gritty, gravely voice keeps these tracks rock- solid and earthbound, where they might otherwise threaten to float off into the ether.

When Buckner veers closer to traditional folk, he invests his songs with an almost apocalyptic urgency. "22," a chilling ballad which details the undoing of a spurned young lover, creeps up to death's door and has the temerity to peek around the corner and report back; "Emma" could have just as easily been written in 1894 as 1994, with its harrowing detail of a young woman who "looks like the good lord has given [her] up." It's the personal nature of Buckner's songs that elevates him far above most other contemporary folk artists, and it's the timelessness of the bulk of his songs that elevates him above almost all rock songwriters. Like Richard Thompson, Buckner is an intelligent, literate wordsmith and a borderline brilliant musician, with a voice so full of expression and grit that pretty much anything he has to say comes out sounding right. And, of course, this was only the beginning. If you dig Bloomed, do not neglect to find his last two albums, Devotion and Doubt and Since.

-Jeremy Schneyer