On his 1994 debut album, Bloomed, Richard Buckner built a memorable song around the line "This is where things start goin' bad," but Buckner made that notion the overriding theme of his second full-length release, 1997's Devotion + Doubt. Written and recorded in the wake of the collapse of Buckner's first marriage, Devotion + Doubt abandons the largely acoustic, string band-influenced approach of Bloomed in favor of a stark, dusty sound that suggests a sleepless night in a motel room in the Arizona desert. J.D. Foster's production and the accompaniment from Calexico founders Joey Burns and John Convertino is often as spare as a whisper in the dark, but the production is a perfect match for the deep insinuations of Buckner's textured voice and the artful, impressionistic heartache of the lyrics, and this is a significantly more ambitious and accomplished effort than Bloomed, as fine as that album was.

When it was first released in 1994, Richard Buckner's debut album Bloomed seemed little short of miraculous, a beautifully spare but rich and compelling set of songs about the sweet and bitter sides of love, accompanied by a superb, primarily acoustic ensemble led by producer Lloyd Maines. In retrospect, Bloomed turned out to reveal just one of the many facets of Buckner's musical personality, but if his muse took him many places after this (and continued to guide him in fascinating ways), this still remains one of the most satisfying and engaging albums in his catalog. Buckner's songs on Bloomed dig deep, whether he's pondering the mysteries of love on "Blue and Wonder" and "Mud," or sketching an indelible portrait of a young man succumbing to despair and self-pity on "22," and his wordplay is at once artful and down to earth, and all the more effective for Buckner's strong, burnished voice and thoughtful phrasing; it's hard to imagine another voice putting so much effortless resonance behind lines like "This is where things start going bad," or "Christ, how this life, from mud to miracles, is just the prettiest little burden."