A Singer With a Voice Beyond His Years

By Peter Watrous
The New York Times, March 16, 1992 
Submitted by Gabby

  Precociousness  is a strange thing, and it made its appearance at a concert by Gods and Monsters, a new group led by the guitarist Gary Lucas and the singer Jeff Buckley. Mr. Buckley, 25 years old but looking closer to 18, is almost surreally gifted. When he sings, it's as if his voice, and the melodies that come with it, were emanating from a far older person, somebody who has had the time to do all the studying it takes to learn as much has he has. Mr. Buckley was the focus of Friday night's show at the Church of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn Heights, partly because he is immensely charismatic and partly because of his ability. The band, made up of B-team musical celebrities, including the bassist Tony Maimone and the drummer Anton Fier, didn't have much to work with. The group's songs, short on melody and barely arranged, with absolutely no dynamics, were plain rock, as gray as yesterday's potatoes.
  The show really began when the rhythm section trundled offstage, leaving  Mr. Buckley and Mr. Lucas up there alone. Mr. Buckley is oddly clumsy onstage, and between songs he alternatley hanged himself and showed his talents.   Introducing a reggae song, Mr. Buckley spoke in a Jamaican patois; it was embarrassing at best. And when introducing a song by Edith Piaf, he mixed the sound of Piaf (coming from a record player, tinny and thin), and a human beat box, exposing a real gift for mimicry.
  That mimicry showed up in a gospel tune he sang alone, accompanying himself on guitar. Singing in a pure falsetto, his voice surged and arched over the guitar, passion in the form of idiomatically correct gospel singing. At other times, he fluttered his voice as if he had been studying ethnographic recordings; sometimes his voice bounced off bad notes, as if it were a drunk sliding off a sidewalk.
  When he and Mr. Lucas worked together, they gathered some real momentum, with Mr. Lucas's finger-picking driving them on, while Mr. Buckley's voice etched strange melodies against the harmonies. They played blues tunes and other pieces, and Mr. Buckley let himself be vulnerable, not  only in the traditional sense of singing about love from the wrong end (on the reggae tune he sang "How long will it take me to be your man  again?" until it seemed like the most profound lament ever written), but also by the sort of emotional exposure that comes from taking a chance.