Buck 65

Canadian backpack rapper Buck 65 is coming home with Situation. It was all wide-eyed wonder on Buck's first few releases, but by the time he was picked up by Warner Music Canada in 2003, he seemed lost. Despite a Juno Award nomination and major label backing for his 2005 release, Secret House Against the World, sales were slim and he lost his U.S. distribution deal, forcing him to look for a new label and snap out of his delirium in the process. Situation is now being released by Sage Francis' Strange Famous Records and Buck takes his style back to the roots to great effect.

He's always handled his own production, and Buck reels in his eccentricities on Situation to make the beats that walk their own path without stumbling all over the place. The shuffle of "Dang" takes steady steps upwards, propelled by well-timed guitar strums. Buck acknowledges that it's good to be home saying, "Do you remember the old ways of rocking it / laying the law down and microphone talking it / telling it, spelling it out in block capitals / cardboard boxing and rap battling."

Buck's still got a voice like sandpaper and his trademark clipped diction is in full effect, but he sounds spry here. And he gets as close as he ever has to making a dance cut on the song "Lipstick," with its bongo backbeat that gives way to the cloud-dancing "oohs" and "aahs" of the chorus. Still a thinking man's hip-shaker, the song deconstructs an anonymous female who uses her feminine wiles to play the men in her life. No overwrought treatise on sexuality, the story is what it is. Funny how maturity sounds more like keeping ideas to yourself, the older you get.

Just because he's giving it to you straight doesn't mean the stories aren't full of twists and turns, though. "Spread 'Em" is Philip Marlowe with a mic. A plodding, hard-boiled synth stomp, punctuated by hells bells, sets the stage for this noir pulp fiction. Buck also incorporates live instruments throughout the album, like the guitar work on "The Outskirts," which blows the perfect breeze through his forlorn musings. For a while he ran the risk of following his wanderlust down a path of no return. But maybe getting lost was for the best, because now that he's back, Buck 65 sounds more like himself than ever.

—Chas Reynolds
11.02.07