Austin American Statesman

February 8, 1994

By Don McLeese

  Three songs into Friday's set, the man leaned over the bar at the Cactus Cafe (a guy who sees more singer-songwriters in a year than I'd wish on anyone in a lifetime) and said, "I don't get it." Jeff Buckley was in the midst of another out-of-body vocal progression-wordless transport, in which the sound of his keening tenor seemed to have a soul of its own-which would soon resolve itself into one of his impressionistic, off-kilter, out-of-focus songs.

  While the performance made plenty of converts among the curious full house at the Cactus-where Buckley made his Austin debut opening for Alejandro Escovedo-there were predictable pockets of resistance. First off, his arrival in town was preceded by some glowing national raves: "Very few young musicians have arrived on the New York scene with the impact of Jeff Buckley," says a five-page feature in the new Musician, while a live review in the current Rolling Stone gushes, "Jeff Buckley can get away with anything."

  Such notice is heady stuff for an artist who has yet to release a full-length album, but it also suggests the sort of flavor-of-the-month fashionability to which Austin is so determinedly resistant. Beyond that, Buckley (who also played Chicago House on Saturday) comes from a very different strain than the Austin school of singer-songwriting, where a certain amount of verbal agility and deadpan cleverness can excuse a lack of musical innovation. Working within tight, traditional strictures, few Austin wordsmiths pay much attention to melodic invention when it's so easy to borrow a tune. The results are as durable and comfortable as a flannel shirt, but too rarely do they startle in the manner that Buckley's performance did.

  In Buckley's music, the risks demand a leap of faith, an immersion into that stream of subconsciousness where whatever the songs mean is less important than how they feel. With his vocal tremble and corrosively metal-edged guitar, he offered bracing contrasts, brittle juxtapositions, a rapturous romanticism that was as nakedly vulnerable as open-heart surgery.

  Though the 26-year-old son of the late Tim Buckley has the intensity and acrobatic vocal range of his father, he has more often drawn comparison with the Van Morrison of Astral Weeks (whose Sweet Thing climaxed Buckley's Cactus performance) and the Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin III. The crucial difference is that where the young Plant always sounded so full of himself, Buckley seems to lose himself when he sings, while pushing his music into areas where he isn't quite sure what he'll find.