Dents and Shells

Dents and Shells is the sixth album by singer-songwriter Richard Buckner, released in 2004 by Merge Records.

Dents and Shells
Studio album by Richard Buckner
Released	October 12, 2004
Studio	Wavelab, Tucson, Arizona Tophat, Austin, Texas Various hotels and hovels
Length	34:35
Label	Merge
Producer	Craig Schumacher, John Harvey
Richard Buckner chronology
Impasse (2002) Dents and Shells (2004) Meadow (2006)

Release

Dents and Shells was released in October 2004. Merge Records celebrated the album's fifteenth anniversary with a re-release on white vinyl in 2019.^[1]

Reception

In an 8/10 Pitchfork review, Brian Howe wrote, "Since that first album, Buckner has created increasingly more ephemeral, impressionistic gradations of tone and mood. Dents and Shells continues to explore Buckner's shadowy continent of song, a Symbolist mirror-world where bright glints of detail fleetingly flash, then submerge, cloaked in shifting fogs... While strongly rooted in classic folk, Buckner's songs are rendered pristinely strange by their smallness and smeariness-- they're vast, dim topographies described by chords that are barely there, recondite realms of visions and visitations."^[2]

In a 3.5 star review comparing Buckner to Elliott Smith and Lou Reed, Darcie Stevens of the Austin Chronicle wrote, "Without elation or regret, Buckner speaks stories, explanations of missteps and wrong turns, contemplations of lost loves and past lives. Dents and Shells is the travelogue of such a road-worn songwriter. A beater of a vehicle with more miles than an odometer can count, Buckner is what he writes."^[3]

Gregory McIntosh of AllMusic described Buckner as "grizzly, conceptual, fragmented, brooding, and plaintive."^[4]

Track listing

All songs written by Richard Buckner.

1. A Chance Counsel
2. Firsts
3. Invitation
4. Straight
5. Her
6. Charmers
7. Fuse
8. Rafters
9. Picture Day
10. As the Waves Will Always Roll

Personnel

• Richard Buckner – guitar, vocals
• Bukka Allen
• King Coffey – drums
• Eric Conn
• Andrew Duplantis – bass
• Mike Hardwick – pedal steel
• Morales
• Gary Newcomb – pedal steel
• Jacob Shulze – guitar
• Brian Standefer
• Artwork by Andrew DeGraff