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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Starfish Room review

Mucchio 1995 205
By Elizabetta Mustillo
Submitted by Sai
Translation by me

  Two young rebels shared the favor of a not very large but enthusiastic audience during a show held at the Starfish in Vancouver.
  The performance of rising star of American music Jeff Buckley was preceded by Brenda Kahn's performance, committed to the promotion of an album that should be released soon with the title Destination Anywhere. The young singer-songwriter gave life to an opening show in which she was mastered by an aggressive fundamental vocality (even though managed almost carelessly) and the dry and incisive sound of the guitars. Kahn has proposed to a rather meagre audience a series of love songs with a beloved flavor, demonstrating a remarkable ability to produce fast and tight rhythmic pieces, even though there were some touching melancholy intimacies during the show.
  But the highlight of the evening had come, of course, by the performance of the 26-year-old son of the unforgotten Tim Buckley. He presented himself to the public with a deeply melancholy expression on his face, which has helped to create an undoubtedly seductive romantic image for him. The concert that included in the setlist almost all songs from the album Grace, that the artist debuted with a few months ago, began with the unmistakable notes of the title track, and then continued with the performance of the various Dream Brother, Eternal Life, Lilac Wine, So Real that have made Grace one of the most interesting records released recently.
  Attention was immediately drawn to Buckley's intense voice, also because this one clearly appeared to be his privileged expressive tool, and the only one involved in the game of upheaval, of freedom of interpretation. Except for an Eternal Life more convulsive and angry than ever before, the interpretation has always been very controlled, almost as if to express the need to focus more on the inner dimension or perhaps instead precisely that of counterbalancing a tension that was released in a devastating way from every performance.
  This sort of balance has been broken anyway, towards the end of the concert, from a very anarchic version of Lover, You Should've Come Over (resumed immediately afterwards in a more conventional, but certainly no less poignant way) which provided the audience with an eloquent example of how inner torment can take the form of the dilation of sounds into slow agony, as well as the torture of the vocal cords.
  And precisely with this exploration of vocal possibilities brought to exasperation Buckley has shown that he belongs to that category of musicians (Jimmi Hendrix in the lead) who materialize the pain and anxiety in the physical torment of the strings of their instrument. During a devastating encore, loudly demanded by the audience, he has increased the dose in this regard, following a full-immersion in the dimension of slow vivisection of the soul a cold and angry hard rock, like a Scottish shower. And that's how Jeff Buckley proved it, without a shadow of a doubt, to seduce his audience rather than an intriguing young poet's accursed image.

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