‘The Mirror’ finds Buck Meek deepening the philosophical bent that has long distinguished his writing, but here it feels less like an aesthetic signature and more like a method of survival. Released on 4AD, the record refracts the plainspoken intimacy he honed with Big Thief into something both porous and prismatic. The title suggests reflection, but the album behaves more like a shifting surface of water: whatever you see in it is altered by movement, by light, by the presence of others gathered around it.
That communal quality is crucial. Meek reunites with producer James Krivchenia, whose work on Big Thief’s ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ and his own ‘Performing Belief’ revealed a fascination with tactile electronics and lived-in experimentation. On ‘The Mirror,’ that fascination is not decorative; it is structural. Instruments trigger modular synthesizers in real time, blurring the line between gesture and echo. The result is an album that feels played and processed simultaneously, as if the room itself were improvising alongside the band.
“Gasoline” opens with a nervous shimmer, guitars flickering against a rhythmic pulse that feels both human and mechanized. Meek’s voice enters not as a declaration but as a question, hovering over Ken Woodward’s grounded bass and the restless drumming (one of four rotating players including Jesse Quebbeman-Turley, Jonathan Wilson, Kyle Crane, and Krivchenia himself). The groove has torque, yet the song resists combustion; instead of exploding, it smolders, examining volatility as a condition of intimacy.
“Pretty Flowers” reframes the pastoral. Where lesser writers might settle for bucolic ease, Meek peers into the ordinary until it yields strangeness. Mary Lattimore’s harp glints at the song’s edges, prismatic and patient, while Adam Brisbin’s guitar threads through the arrangement like a vine seeking light. The choir of Germaine Dunes, Staci Foster, Jolie Holland, and Adrianne Lenker doesn’t swell so much as hover, turning the track into a shared breath.
The album’s emotional hinge arrives early with “Can I Mend It?” Meek’s songwriting has always specialized in the art of the right question, and here the inquiry becomes existential. The lyric does not plead for resolution; it interrogates the very notion of repair. Alex Somers’ synthesizers and toy microphone textures lend the track a ghostly patina, while Adrian Olsen’s modular melodies curl around Dylan Meek’s piano lines. The music suggests that mending is not a return to what was, but an acceptance of visible seams.
“Ring Of Fire” and “Demon” form a compelling diptych. The former simmers with a kinetic undercurrent, its rhythm section elastic and alert, while the latter pares back into a more interior landscape. On “Demon,” Meek’s vocal was recorded outdoors on the porch of the Los Angeles log cabin studio, Ringo Bingo and carries the ambience of open air. You can almost sense the boundary between inside and outside, band and environment. The electronic elements do not sterilize that feeling; they heighten it, as if amplifying the night sounds around him.
“God Knows Why” leans into ambiguity without collapsing into vagueness. Meek treats uncertainty as a shared human inheritance rather than a personal defect. The choir reappears like a conscience, not to judge but to witness. “Heart In The Mirror,” the title track in spirit if not in sequence, contemplates reflection not as narcissism but as confrontation: what does it mean to look at oneself and see not a fixed identity but a shifting interplay of memory, desire, and fear?
Late-album highlights revel in the earthy and the ineffable, respectively. “Worms” roots itself in physicality, Woodward’s bass thick and tactile, the drums digging into a groove that feels almost agricultural. “Soul Feeling” loosens its grip on gravity, drifting toward abstraction without losing melodic clarity. Meek’s phrasing is deceptively simple; he allows space around each line, trusting the band to color the silence.
“Deja Vu” stands as one of the record’s most poignant meditations. Meek acknowledges the limits of understanding even as he yearns for connection. The interplay between acoustic instrumentation and modular synth pulses mirrors the song’s theme of repetition and variation; familiar shapes returning with altered contours. Lenker’s vocal presence is subtle but essential, a spectral harmony that feels less like accompaniment and more like memory itself.
The closing track, “Outta Body,” does not offer transcendence so much as perspective. Rather than floating away, Meek seems to step slightly to the side of himself, observing with compassion the very questions that animate the album. The rotating drummers converge into a dynamic arc that feels earned rather than imposed, and the ensemble of friends, family, longtime collaborators, coalesces into something larger than any individual contribution.
What makes ‘The Mirror’ remarkable is not merely its sonic ambition but its ethical posture. Meek approaches songwriting as an act of inquiry. He resists tidy conclusions, preferring to dwell in the generative tension between doubt and devotion. In doing so, he reframes the mundane as mysterious and the mysterious as intimately knowable. The mirror he holds up is not a tool for self-regard; it is an instrument for shared reflection.
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