Amer­ic­an alt.country legends Richard Buck­ner and Edith Frost are play­ing togeth­er at the San Fran­cisco Bath­house on Wed­nes­day night.

There are three kinds of Amer­ic­an folk artist: those who sit, con­ten­ted, on a back porch con­tem­plat­ing Amer­ica’s land­scape and ways; those for whom its land­scape and ways are some­thing to stand against or move boldly through; and those whose Amer­ica is a shad­owy, impres­sion­ist­ic place that moves inside of them. This [lat­ter] is the area that the sombre-voiced Richard Buck­ner has been explor­ing since 1984 –(Sylvie Sim­mons; The Guard­i­an, 2004)

Richard Buck­ner is the true ‘Amer­ic­an Wan­der­er’. The Amer­ic­an land­scape is the back­drop he moves against (lit­er­ally as well as fig­ur­at­ively; he’s been trav­el­ing the North Amer­ic­an con­tin­ent for two dec­ades now) and his rela­tion­ship to it is shift­ing and ambigu­ous, a com­plic­ated state of exist­ing with­in and without a coun­try that is impossible to escape from unscathed. He’s worked along­side and recor­ded with Calex­ico, Giant Sand, Neko Case among many oth­ers, and he’s been described by Howe Gelb as hav­ing “one of the finest voices on the plan­et”.

Edith Frost walks a fine line, music­ally speak­ing, between san­ity and utter mad­ness. Since the nineties she’s been tak­ing the con­ven­tions of intro­spec­ted folk and alt-coun­try and cram­ming it with such kitsch oddit­ies and child­like arrange­ments as occur to her along the way. Her voice is the dusty, low pitched croon you might expect of an old-time coun­try heart­break­er, but this is a woman who also digs on Blon­die and has no qualms about for­cing the glar­ing city lights of New Wave onto the quiet coun­try and folk roads that under­pin her music. Edith fea­tured on the Drag City super ses­sion, along­side Bill Cal­la­han, Brendan Murphy, Rian Murphy and Jim O’Rourke.

This is a show not to be missed.

RICHARD BUCKNER, EDITH FROST + GUESTS
WEDNESDAY 18th APRIL
SAN FRANCISCO BATHHOUSE

Tick­ets are $25 plus book­ing fee, avail­able from Slow Boat Records in Cuba Street.

Links:
MySpace pages for Richard Buck­ner and Edith Frost.