Mojo "Grace" Review

Mojo Magazine, September 1994

By Mick Houghton

Submitted by Niella

Over the last few months Jeff Buckley has become a contender. A minor critical furore greeted his first live mini-LP, while a handful of mesmeric solo performances in March met with ecstatic drooling-this despite the disadvantages that famous parentage usually carries. Jeff's dad, Tim Buckley, was a genuinely unique force in music, a tough act to follow even for a son who scarcely knew him. The questions remain, however: Is Jeff Buckley merely wearing the emperor's new clothes, or his father's hand-me-downs, or is he a truly major, emergent new talent? Somewhat tantalizingly, the answer on the strength of this, his first real album, appears to be all three.

Sensibly, Jeff Buckley has tried to play down the "like father, like son" aspect, but there is no escaping it. His vocal dexterity alone, one of Tim Buckley's calling cards, is uncannily similar. They also share that same poetic soul and the tendency to excess and exaggeration, something which marred Tim Buckley's first two LPs, Tim Buckley and Hello and Goodbye. It wasn't until Happy Sad that Buckley Snr curbed the overly baroque arrangements and lyrics that rendered his first two LPs largely hippy period pieces. The path forward was there in controlled, measured songs like Once I Was, Song Slowly Sung, and Morning Glory. And he rarely looked back thereafter.

Jeff Buckley is by no means going up a blind alley-far from it-but he often drops emotional depth charges that miss the mark. These are mostly showing off. Then again, if you had a voice that could swoop, dive, fly and fall at will, wouldn't you use it? Gifts of this nature, however, need to be used wisely. When he does it's a wonder to behold. When he fails, you feel you must've picked up a Colin Bluntstone LP by mistake.

Lilac Wine (that same Elkie Brooks hit) is simply a crowd-pleaser. Performed live it's soulful and impressive but, as sensitively as it's handled, it has no place here. Such songs work live because the artist can convey them by his presence-on record they're mere cold work-outs. The most extreme case is Corpus Christi Carol  (for Roy): arranged from a Benjamin Britten composition it is, undeniably, executed to perfection. So he can sing like a choirboy, but it lessens the impact of the two fine songs either side. If there's a lesson to be learned from his father then it's knowing how to create a mood, an atmosphere, and suck the listener in-these two songs simply stem the flow.

If all this seems harsh, it's because Jeff's own songs are too good to diminish. Even better are his arrangements. using mostly just his own Telecaster and simple bass and drums, plus occasional and wonderful strings, he can create extraordinary musical constructs. It's no mean achievement that he can convey the essence of a by-gone '60s songwriter era but give it contemporary flavor. At best he drags in influences from all over the place-Hendrix, Zeppelin, The Beatles-and makes them seem like perfectly normal bedfellows.

Opening the album, Mojo Pin sets the tone, an inter-racial ballad that comes in early with the line "this body will never be safe from harm". He then mixes Zeppelin-influenced heavy blues with dreamy Cocteaus guitar and the first of many subtle Beatle reference points-the backwards guitar of Revolver.

Two master strokes follow: Grace and Last Goodbye, one so complex in its arrangement that it belies the simplicity of the end result, the other simplicity itself. Both are uncomfortably moving-one fixated with death, the other with lost love. You want to tell him to lighten up, but you don't want to stop the sheer enjoyment you that you feel at the expense of his misery. Mixed emotions. Happy/sad.

Last Goodbye is simply breathtaking. A choppy, strummed rhythm drives the song, under more Beatle-esque, raga strings and a lyric of a doomed relationship reminiscent of the fated Bogart/Gloria Grahame pairing in Nicholas Ray's film In a Lonely Place. It's that good. It also recalls Tim Buckley's Sweet Surrender. Like I said, it's that good.

Rarely has a tortured soul been so appealing. Take Eternal Life: "Eternal life is on my trail/Got my red gleaming coffin/Just need one more nail". This mortality-confronting epic, set against sub-metal riffing, as grinding as he can be delicate, is again arranged remarkably. As this bluesy grunge gets into its stride, I Am The Walrus-type strings swirl in and Buckley, briefly, even lifts Lennon's melody line.

Grace contains other such remarkable moments. A depth of feeling combined with a mature sense of song structure and musical direction make the superlatives already dished out to Jeff Buckley not merely an exercise in critical wishful thinking. He is said to dismiss all this critical sycophancy because it doesn't fit with the way he feels about himself. Put it another way: when you're this good, you don't need to be told. You need to learn how to live with it.

Jeff Buckley is potentially that good. In Howard Hawks's western Rio Bravo, when comparing his fast draw ability with the Dean Martin character, John Wayne spits out that classic line: "I wouldn't want to live by the difference." Time will tell what the difference between Jeff and Tim's talents might be. For now, Lillian Roxon's famous line, said of Tim Buckley in 1968, at a similar stage of his career to his son's, is eerily appropriate: "There is no name yet for the places he and his voice can go."