Buck Curran — Far Driven Sun (Obsolete/Echodelick/ESP-Disk)
Buck Curran’s latest record celebrates craft of all types. The craft of melody, of musicianship, of tone, of capturing and shaping sounds; of building the instruments themselves. A one-of-a-kind acoustic guitar, the 30-year-old, hand-built Butterfly, is presented in lush vistas, layered with stabs of counterpoint, gentle shades of reverb and the soft scrape of fingers on strings. Buck came up in the same freak folk circles as Jack Rose, and he is the guardian of Robbie Basho’s guitar. Despite these potent influences, Buck has found his own voice in steel string centered instrumental music. His playing is patient and pristine, but these assemblies of blended guitar owe as much to classic rock as they do to any other guitar soli tradition. The melodicism and accessibility of the songs on Far Driven Sun recall those notable tracks where rockers go Takoma style, or at least instrumental, and strike gold — think of Black Sabbath’s “Fluff”, Duane Allman’s “Little Martha,” even the delicate spaces of Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross”—that’s the sort of dreamy, wide-open territory covered on the path to the Far Driven Sun.
Far Driven Sun asks listeners to pay attention to the guitar itself, the sound of its materiality, in a way that few records insist on. The opening track, which shares a title with the record, introduces the instrument with a sparse melodic figure, alone at first, then joined by a complimentary riff. The close, high-definition recording style admits creaks and the sounds of friction, but it also recreates the sustain and warmth of this rare construction of sacred, exotic wood. It’s a short tune, the star of the show stepping out from behind the curtain. Once introductions have been dispensed with, other possibilities are immediately explored. The propulsive “Unicorn Song” lays down a bed of strums over which a brass slide and an e-bow are used on the Butterfly to make sounds so sonorous and smooth you would swear it was the neck pickup on a Jazz Master being played through a vintage Fender Twin, not an acoustic guitar. Throughout Far Driven Sun Curran weaves guitars masterfully. Sheets of slide, sonic aurora, embed themselves between the hollows of patient fingerstyle arpeggios; waves of e-bow ambience crash against rhythmic shores, beauty resides in the spaces between sparse notes. Far Driven Sun is proof positive of the way in which a purposefully limited palette, instrumental in this case, can push creative boundaries.
There is an exception to every rule, however, and on the climactic cut “ILiad (Slight Return),” Buck brings a rhythm section to bear on a theme that was explored earlier on the album, a structural/titular reference to Jimi Hendrix’s unforgettable revisitation of “Voodoo Chile” that closes out Electric Ladyland. In “ILiad (Slight Return)” one can almost hear a future full band Buck Curran record. His rock-inflected playing works just as well with the advent of bass and insistent drums as it does with his own tasteful overdubs, but the deployment is so restrained: the textbook definition of leaving them wanting more.
Thematically, Far Driven Sun is a record about how the vast expanse and wonder of the universe is situated and experienced locally, in the carbon atoms of the wood of a singular guitar, or in the intimate human galaxies that are families. Tunes like “Unicorn Song,” which was named by Buck’s daughter and appears three times in different incarnations across the record, or “You Are My Sun” demonstrate that this creative cosmos revolves around children and partners, the closeness of the home hearth. “ILiad (Slight Return),” “Deserto Parallax” and the album’s title track show the cosmic and spiritual distances covered in this musical journey. Ultimately, however, much like the Odyssey, the classical companion to the Iliad invoked in the peak moment of Far Driven Sun, this is a record about returning home to the things that are essentially important. The cherished family and the perfectly crafted, one-of-a-kind tools that inspire the best work an artist can do. Buck might have taken a queue here from the legendary cuisine of his adopted home country, Italy. Just a few simple ingredients and a lot of love and intention produce a sublime result.
