A Particle Ride: Buck Meek at The Sinclair 07/08

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Christian Jones

Buck Meek is a man of many bands. There is his solo output, the occasion of this night, then there is Big Thief, for which he may be best known. There is also, as of this year, Kisser, a folk-rock band Meek and his partner, Germaine Dunes, formed. They play all two of their bandcamp tracks and then some. “Bad Boy Mountain” is a cheeky, chugging rock track featuring Dunes’ whispery, childlike vocals. “Ghostgirl” has a catchy, mystical folk-rock sound, like if Wednesday covered a song from Adrianne Lenker’s abysskiss. 

After a quick change, Meek emerges looking like the smell of fresh linen in a white, pinstriped tee—untucked and unbuttoned—some black slacks and a pair of shiny black boots. Meek opens his set with the propulsive “Gasoline,” his strumming fast like a fluttering heartbeat as he sings in a syncopated croon, “Will it be me or will it be her/ To say I love you first?” On “God Knows Why,” the guitarist, Adam Brisbin, launches into scuzzy guitar interludes, full of deliciously jagged distortion, offering a crunchier take on the soft folk-ish track. For the earnest jam, “Can I Mend It?,” Brisbin keeps up his freewheeling feedback, swinging the guitar around to bend the soundwaves along gravity’s curve. That torn-up guitar becomes the embodied sonic counterpoint to Meek’s gentle delivery of the lines “Last night, I lost my temper and punched the wall/ I think I broke a finger and broke your heart.”

“Pretty Flowers” follows, and the tone shifts to a breezy summer day—in Meek’s twinkling guitar riff I can practically see him plucking off rose petals, wondering to himself: “The more I get to know you the less I know of love/ Is it science? Is it art?/ Can I learn to give away my heart?” He drops into a Beatles-esque jam on “Demon,” singing about typical things like “six dimensions unobserved/ The shape of love in Calabi-Yau manifolds” or a line from his friend “Tucker Zimer-zim-zim-zimmerman.” Throughout his songs, Meek peppers his existential musings with strange string-theory stuff: love is the invisible dimensional structure of reality; we may reincarnate as light beams and photons bouncing around. Much like some of the most thematically interesting songs his other band, Big Thief, have put out, Meek can find a needle in a cosmic haystack—that is to say, he pulls off metaphors of wild association, braiding bluegrass and stardust in a way that makes folk music feel refreshingly of-the-times.

Meek switches to playing throwbacks, where the human moments, with or without the stars there to see, are as large as the world. “He fixed my Grandma’s Cadillac/ She threw two rods/ And didn’t even charge her for the block,” Meek sings on the tender “Joe by the Book.” On “Pareidolia,” Meek is all twang, singing in a high-nasal, string-bend tone about cloud watching. When Brisbin turns the twinkling chimes into a tear-up riff, Meek joins in, sticking out his tongue and making a silly face as the two swirl sound together. With the strum of a familiar chord, the crowd starts cheering—most of all the woman standing next to me, who, at the beginning of the show, told her partner that she loved Big Thief. As Meek sings a crunchy rock rendition of “Certainty,” two boys near center stage start dancing and, quickly, all the people around them catch on, manifesting in real-time the line “sine wave is a particle ride.” Another couple standing near me, dancing to “Ring of Fire,” steal glances at each other that quietly give away the first line: “Be my bride, my lover/ Would you be the mother of my child?” 

Before the encore, Meek shares how this show is a homecoming of sorts—he had previously lived in Kendall, Central, Winter Hill, J.P., Commonwealth, and…Braintree (to much laughter). The incredibly fragile “Halo Light” comes after, and the audience is dead silent, as if in prayer. Meek closes out the set with the unreleased track, “Kiss My Mirror”—fitting for what an intimate rapport he has made of us throughout the night. With its incredibly catchy riff, the audience can’t help but sway, woop, and cheer.