Forging old rock sounds into new

The Sydney Morning Herald: August 30, 1995

By Bruce Elder

Jeff Buckley, Metro Theatre, Aug 28

  It is likely that after 40 years, rock 'n' roll as a genre has played every card in its limited pack. All that is left for young musicians is to reshuffle the deck and try to win the game with interesting new strategies. Thus, Jeff Buckley, one of the hottest and most interesting of all the new talents to emerge in the past 18 months, doesn't offer anything particularly new. Rather he pulls together a combination of influences and comes up with a performance which, through sheer dint of his emotional commitment and on-stage charisma, establishes him as one of the most significant and innovative performers to have emerged in the past five years.

  Buckley's influences are both rich and incongruous. Not surprisingly, his primary influence comes from his late father, Tim Buckley. His father's music was strange, often unsuccessful but never uninteresting, mixture of  jazz, folk, and rock 'n' roll. In a very real sense Buckley junior has taken up this baton and pushed the possibilities further.

  But his influences are much more complex than just a family tradition. At times he swerves off in the direction of New York punk circa 1978. At one point he offered a sizzling, and highly eccentric, version of the MC5's punk classic Kick Out the Jams. At other times his approach to guitar playing-everything from barely touching the strings to forcing ear-bleeding feedback from the speakers-hovers in a world explored by guitarists as diverse as Robert Fripp and Fred Frith. At other times, when his band of Mick Grondahl (bass), Matt Johnson (drums) and Michael Tighe (guitar) unleash their fiery, pent-up energy, he is reminiscent of those forgotten avant-garde west coast bands who inhabited San Francisco in the late 1960s.

  Like his father, Buckley understands the importance of sonic textures. He whispers and wails. His guitar roars one minute and drops into silence the next.

  Songs build from almost folky introductions to become great walls of guitar intensity. At times, conventional shape and form dissolve. He has an instinctive understanding of light and shade and of the dynamics which will keep a performance interesting.

  Buckley's debut album Grace was a deeply flawed, love-it-or-hate-it, hotch-potch of experiments and sublime, emotional singing. Any reservations the album may have created are swept away by his live performance. His stength lies in the way he has brought together old rock elements and forged them into something something new, challenging and successfully experimental. The  result is a performance of great power and integrity from an immensely gifted performer who effortlessly seduces and mesmerises his audience his audience. Not surprisingly, as the capacity audience drifted off into the night, there was a feeling that this was one of those performances that will be long remembered and treasured.