"Heroism and Heartbreak, Alt-Country Style"

Honestly, he's a sick man.

Canada native and alt-country crooner Richard Buckner sits on stage with a couple of guitars, an assortment of pedals and his deep, beautiful voice and uses all of the above to reopen old wounds and put his fingers inside them. He'll mess around a little in there, have some fun.

And that's just what he does to the audience.

As a crowd of just over 60 witnessed at the Mohawk Place Wednesday evening, Buckner is anything but run of the mill. A later addition to the night's bill, he entered the stage confusing onlookers, and left the stage with them spellbound.

Dressed in simply a jean jacket, blue button down shirt, jeans and cowboys boots, the respected songwriter looked curious, with only a classical guitar, a child's guitar, an e-bow and pedals. From the first note to the last, his words barely overcame a "thank you" and his demeanor rarely moved away from sullen.

Truth be told, Buckner doesn't need to communicate between songs. He doesn't need witty banter. All he needs is in his mouth and in his hands. His words come out in a throaty country croon - the type of voice that can only be fostered with tireless heartbreak, elation, victory, defeat and a strict diet of cigarettes and alcohol.

Poetic lyrics like "There are things even drunks like us won't forget/ So put your arms around me and bring your mouth up to mine," mean just a little more coming from a voice that sounds like it sprung from a lovechild of soul and country.

His other weapons are his fingers, which move across the guitar in a way that takes the emotional palette and somehow finds new, darker colors with which to paint.

Buckner played a variety of music, from selections off his critically acclaimed "Impasse" to the highlight of the evening, a reworked, more active version of "Boys, The Night Will Bury You" from his self-titled release last summer - a record containing acoustic versions of his favorite songs.

As he denied the crowd's requests for more - at one point prefacing his last song by answering a shouted song request with a simple, "No, I don't want to play that one" - it became increasingly evident that the music wasn't a part of Buckner's life; it was his life that was a part of the music.

Broken marriages, hollowed-out relationships and empty promises were not his property alone. With the way Buckner orchestrates a song, his lyrics hold an ambiguity that simply begs to be peeled free from the air and painted onto a listener's personal memory.

Squeezed onto a bill with indie pianist Amanda Rogers - whose cover of Radiohead's "No Surprises" was one of the few non-disappointing Radiohead covers in the history of mankind - spacey shoegazing locals Sleeping Kings of Iona and hard-rockers Elementary Thought Process, Buckner's late addition to the bill probably accounted for a good portion of the turnout.

Wednesday night marked Buckner's first Buffalo appearance in over three years, and he showed why he had been missed.