Low Cal Vocalist

JEFF BUCKLEY
LA2, LONDON

Melody Maker: 1995 Jan 28
By Jennifer Nine
Contributed by Sai

  I DONT know what it costs elsewhere in Soho, but here at the Astoria 2, Jeff Buckley does it for eight quid.

  Virtual ecstasy. Every throat goes dry. Oh god, oh god, oh god. God’s face and Chris Isaak’s chest. You’ll get no sense from the supplicants, drinking him in in that ray-traced, blue nimbus of light, mumbling in that low, persistent, coercive intimacy. Armed to the perfect teeth with our scrabbly dreams.

  And triumphant with the weight of our love-and his self-love, shot through the prettiness like a bad aftertaste. The brooding, blank-faced cool of a million Matt Dillons and twice the actor. A shadowy band whose shimmering guitar haze is a mere backdrop even when it swells to the calculated, bruised massivity of Soundgarden strapped to a flywheel.

  And That Voice! Oh, it’s so real. Rapacious with ambition, swelling with orgasmic ululations that all the vowels in the universe couldn’t spell, although “eeeyah-uh yiii ayy eeyuuaa” is a start. You could play air guitar to it. It goes on forever: his dad, Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, choirboy, Robert Plant, Robert Plant, Robert Plant with instruction in New Man humility. Pleading, pretend frantic. “Oh, baby”, troubled “I love you”s, huge slicks of heartbreak, swooping over the rock critics’ and Q fans’ backtrack devotionals, massaging moody young things clutching their calculated self-pity and their self-abuse a deux. Massaging the massed ranks of PAs, whose catcalls and tipsy shouts to the stage are the only spontaneous truths here tonight.

  But he’s an artist. Artfully unselfconscious, shrugging of his plaid shirt and ignoring the wolf whistles-Richard Gere in “American Gigolo” with a guitar as prop. Head tilted back onto those heartbreak cheekbones, hovering languidly through his own songs’ passing delicacy, pinned to an endless linear succession of Led Zeppelin rockist crescendos laid end to relentless, numbing end. The self-referential proclamations of “Grace”; the sudden, melodic prettiness of “Last Goodbye”, drenched here in scrotum-tightening yowls of “kiss me, oooh, kiss me” as though the demand needs to be made; the world going cold; tears spilling; ecstatic, slow-mo, spiritual sex; the moonshine; the ocean.

  And, of course, the finest quality covers, smothered half to death under pillowtalk. Cohen’s still, majestic “Hallelujah” stretched to a narcoleptic crawl of pained intensity and incomprehensible Kermit-The-Frog vocal excursions. Or the jaw-dropping travesty of Big Star’s “Holocaust”, Buckley slipping from sassy misinterpretation to milking the junkie chic as greedily as a vampire at an artery, while the band’s surging guitars club it into a coma.

  No, not whoring. Colder than that.