Jeff Buckley mesmerizes with audacious style

The Boston Globe: October 25, 1994

By Paul Robicheau SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE

Music Review: Jeff Buckley with Brenda Kahn 

At: The Charles Playhouse, last night

  "His songs are exquisitely controlled: quiet, complex mosaics of powerful, electric sound...The voice-crisp, full of strength and character-can soar, yet remain tender and delicate." So read the jacket to Tim Buckley's 1966 debut. The same could be said of "Grace," the first album from his son Jeff. The younger Buckley doesn't sound very much like his father, but he shares his eccentric spirit, and isn't looking back.

  Jeff Buckley mesmerized an an audience of 350 at the Charles Playhouse last night, opening a national tour with a stunning set that proved just how audacious, fragile and original he is. Stylistically, it comes as no surprise that the first album Buckley owned was Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti." But from that base, he wove visceral dynamics with a grunge-like passion and tightrope control, not only in luminous guitar timbres, but a quavering falsetto that was only more commanding in concert.

  Looking a bit disheveled in an untucked flannel shirt with dangling key ring, Buckley wasted no time in reaching powerful extremes with opener "Mojo Pin" (which exploded out of a Hare Kirshna-like moan) and "So Real," the one song for which he chose an acoustic guitar-only to rub it into his amp for a feedback solo.

  But it was the New York-based artist's malleable voice that impressed most. At times Buckley suggested Freddie Mercury as an avant-garde garage rocker, his falsetto weaving like a dragonfly in Nina Simone's "Lilac Tree," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (a solo final encore where one could hear a pin drop) and a daring a cappella ad-lib where he lived a lifetime alone in the line "Nobody knows how deep my love for you really goes."

  Buckley's arrangements had an eerie sliding quality with a raw punch around the corner in songs like "Last Goodbye," and both were expertly shadowed by his three-piece band. "Dream Brother" began with drummer Matt Johnson tapping his snare like a tabla before bursting into a full-bore release, with Buckley rearing his head and flourishing through power chords.

  But just as Buckley could build a song to a banshee wail (as he did in "Grace," displaying angst when he dropped his pick and lashed into the chords with his thumb, breaking a string), he could caress a tender thought like those in "Lover, You Should've Come Over." This night showed the growth of a talent.

  Brenda Kahn, another streetwise New Yorker, also tested a new band and songs from an upcoming second album. She came off like a female Lou Reed in "She's A Yellow Sun," and engaged in a street poem which kept pausing on the line "I don't want the apple in his mouth." But her singing had an annoying quality; she was overmatched in voice and originality on this night.