Garage, Glasgow Review

Melody Maker, April 1, 1995
By Jamie T. Conway
Submitted by Ana

JEFF BUCKLEY

THE GARAGE, GLASGOW

EVERY year. Without fail. Teachers would smile at my mate Stephen Parker and say, "Ah, brother of the glorious Robert! At Oxford now, isn't he? I'll expect great things of you." And later wondered why he tried to kill him.
  The surefire method of incurring Jeff Buckley's wrath is to invoke the memory of his Famous Biological Relation (He met him twice. This is not a father. This is a car park attendant.) He hates that. Loathes it. Bellows for blood whenever page features written by journalists who remember his father appear.
  We shouldn't be surprised he's eager to avoid comparisons; Buckley Snr's legacy is justifiably sacrosanct, and as Jeff isn't charging full-tilt at the windmills of convention, some have begun dismissing him as an unworthy heir, conveniently forgetting the Arran-sweatered tedium of pater's debut, or that it took him five albums to trump Creation with "Lorca"and "Starsailor". Having had the wisdom to begin his recording career later, Jnr is already a more promising proposition than his father would initially have seemed; the eclecticism of "Grace" indicates a talent which will consistently confound and wrongfoot its critics, underlined by tonight's bizzare but invigorating lurch through "Kick Out The Jams". And snigger all you want, but I'm furious when he betrays "Lilac Wine" by inserting "you broke my heart, you bastard." Someone must have told him about Elkie Brooks.
  When he's not playing the clodhopping clown, we get a spirited trot through his own material, and once you've got over the undeniable similarity of that bloodied harpoon of a voice and you-know-who, you think more of Van Morrison, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Marvin Gaye, and every other poetic, sensitive soul moved to write songs like snowfall in moonlight because they haven't had any in months.
  But his greatest asset-his naive, unalloyed idealism-is also his Achilles heel. The line between purity and puerility is a fine one, and so however lovely his output may be, it's ultimately somewhat facile, and his cover of "Hallelujah" fails; it was made to be sung by grizzled veterans like John Cale, someone buckling under the weight of accumulated regret and who truly understands "Love is not a victory march/It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah". But when Jeff Buckley's dreams have been reduced to ash, and he can't rinse the acrid aftertaste from his mouth, expect Mount Everest on stilts.