Unless you're one of those strange people who dislikes Jimmie Dale Gilmore's voice, it's hard not to fall for the operatic country majesty of Richard Buckner's California-bred twang. Of all the smooth-singing artists pigeonholed into the alt-country genre, Buckner ranks highest -- particularly when set against music as grainy and authentic-sounding as the dusty tracks residing here.

While he's a significantly different kind of performer than Kind of Like Spitting's Ben Barnett, Buckner is similarly gifted in that his voice can make even the inauthentic sound rich and tragically true. There's a symphony of emotion swirling through all of his work, and only when you obsess about it can anything really negative shine through. The only other Buckner record I own, the J.D. Foster-produced Devotion and Doubt, has a definite appearance of greatness: good melodies, that fantastic voice and a level of production that every outlaw singer would like for his own material. None of those songs stuck in my head for more than a minute, though; I think it's because that particular batch of material was a tad hollow. The best songs earned resonance only from that voice, that damn amazing voice. Feeling as if his material merely attempted to evoke great country albums which came before, I quickly gave up on Richard Buckner as a prodigious vocal talent with a soul that was artistically closed. So many wonderful artists are like this, admittedly, and go around faking feelings. Sometimes they can do this successfully, but it's almost always a pisser if one tries to fake gloom. I think if you need to feign anything in art, you should go the honest route and feign happiness, which we often must feign in life.

Then again, Richard Buckner's voice is not exactly equipped to sing happy songs. Like Ben Barnett's beautiful voice, it seems God-ordained to evoke just degrees of despair. While The Hill might be seen as an artist going for broke, I see it more as the work of a performer who knows his strengths and his present limitations. Richard Buckner's life might be too damn nice or uneventful to provide his voice with true dramatic landscapes, and so he has built this effort around Edgar Lee Master's dark, visually exciting Spoon River Anthology. And, from what I make of it, he has one-upped Edgar Lee by a poem or two. His band is nothing short of genius on the instrumentals, with the guitars being hit so hard that you know somebody close is dead, while the vocal numbers show an amazing, flat-out brilliant gift at converting poetry to song. The only piece that seemed to resist alt-country translation, a ghostly sing-speak bit about "Ollie Mcgee", is terribly evocative, and far more effective than any of Bob Dylan's (or John Wesley Harding's) latest attempts at traditional numbers.

Running less than forty minutes, The Hill is something of a climb to get through at one sitting, but I'm clueless as to where faults might lie. While it's almost blasphemous to suggest this (because I really love his voice; have I made that clear?), my only recommendation would be to emulate Tom Russell or John Prine and take some guest singers along for the harrowing ride. Either that or fiddle with the song order. That The Hill follows a format of instrumental-vocal-instrumental from start to finish is the only thing dull about this illuminating, masterful work.