JEFF BUCKLEY
GRACE
Columbia Col475928
10tks/55 mins/All formats/FP
BECAUSE, after a series of desperate but sadly unsuccessful attempts, he finally realized that it wasn't actually possible to carve lyric poetry into the night sky with a 300-foot flamethrower, Jeff Buckley became a singer.
"Grace" puts me in mind of what all those bands formed by young Hollywood stars might have sounded like if Hollywood was still HOLLYWOOD, and the square-jawed buggers could boast a single grain of stardust between them-partly due to Jeff's movie-star looks, cool-Californian stage persona, and his habit of talking wonderfully incoherent Utopian stoner babble, but mainly because near enough all these songs are awash with the drama and mystique they first built 25-foot screens for.
In "Mojo Pin", a choked, meandering vocal weaves through ornate ripples of open-tuned guitar; the title track boasts a chord sequence to cartwheel to. Elsewhere he adds a wonderful feel of doomed, youthful romanticism to covers of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", the "Corpus Christi Carol" and, rather more bizarrely, "Lilac Wine" by perennial "Two Ronnies" guest Elkie Brooks.
"So Real" is a song of surrender to the raised-vein thunder of The Moment (being, in this case, a night when Jeff and some pretty chum "walked around till the the moon grew full, like a plate, and the wind blew an invocation"). He never stepped on the cracks because he thought he'd hurt his mother.
"I love you," whispers Jeff. "And I'm afraid to love you." My Bloody Valentine once conveyed that sudden, shocking self-realization with a mesh of bleeding noise; Buckley uses his voice, drawn out like a slow-stretched bolus of heavenly bubblegum (Alright!!!-Ed).
It's a voice that leaps tall buildings in a single bound, smells of sex and Chanel and never stoops to showboating. Dull people would remark "He could sing his shopping list and it would sound fantastic," (Like, YOU'D never slip it in a review, right?-Ed) which, luckily, legitimizes his more embarrassing stabs at lyrical flash. Indeed, when Jeff sings about girls with green eyes and "butterscotch hair", you don't just picture them, you fancy them rotten (but that's the thing about the Nineties, don't you think? The most alluring quality one can possess is to be fictional). Anyway, "Grace" is a massive, gorgeous record, a record that floats all talk of famous dads out onto the lake on a makeshift raft and leaves it there, and starts where every other singer-songwriter in town says, "Whoa!", pulls up his horse and backs off.
Because the point at which others are struck dumb with rapture is the moment Jeff Buckley finds his voice, and starts singing.
Jeff Buckley appears on the MM stage on Sunday, August 28
TAYLOR PARKES
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