aaamusic | On 03, Oct 2011

Sounding like a cross between Chris Cornell’s solo rock works as well as touching upon his awful electronica sound too, Richard Buckner releases his LP Our Blood.  Having already forged a modest fan base utilising a mixture of acoustic music & country-styled songs, Richard returns to his acoustic roots for his first album in five years.

His latest work is largely disappointing.  Richard places far too much reliance on his own mediocre voice, very few singers can do this without either having a world class producer or possessing genuinely phenomenal vocal talents.  As Richard has neither of these, his LP becomes little more than a tedious way to kill 48 minutes.

If you take the track Witness for instance, it’s slower than the cast of The Only Way is Essex and duller as well.  The track is one-toned, one-paced and features one instrument.  Utilising just his voice and a keyboard, Richard performs magic as he turns this 200 second track into what seems like a weekends worth of dullness.  Other tracks don’t fare much better either with Escape making you contemplate whether his music was the reason he was locked up.  Ponder sounds like the backing music for an Oxfam advertisement & Hindsight just makes me think with some he wouldn’t have produced this garbage.

I would comment on his other 8 tracks but frankly I’m sure you get the picture on this album.  All the tracks are too slow and contain seemingly the same few notes on a keyboard played in a different order 12 times.  The guitar isn’t too bad; however this is almost instantly forgotten because everything else is so poor.

There aren’t too many positives I can draw on from his awful LP.  I suppose its good he didn’t make it a double album or add any bonus tracks to prolong the suffering, so kudos to Richard for at least being considerate.  Aside from that his album is a complete waste of time, so much so that I’ve resorted to watching the Scottish Premier League as it seemed more interesting than his interpretation of ‘music’.  Recommend for fans of dust, stamp collectors and Adrian Chiles.

 

Author: Tom Crowther