MM Sin-e review

April 9, 1994

JEFF BUCKLEY

LIVE AT SIN-E

Big Cat ABB61XCD/4tks/27 mins/MP

FOLKIES-Arran sweaters, sandals and a face that would disgrace even Captain Birds Eye after a night on the lager. Jeff Buckley-young and electric with the kind of fanny-moistening good looks only a Hollywood surgeon could chisel. And he can write a good tune too. Nirvana!

  The highlight of Buckley's two recent London shows was to watch someone actually working for their wage-going for notes which, by rights, they had only an even chance of hitting, yet, in the process, creating an atmosphere which left everybody in the room stunned into silence.

  This four-track mini-LP (fat bastid of a single?) retains the edge an abandon that characterized those shows yet, because it was recorded in a tiny bar in Greenwich Village, loses none of the intimacy that makes JB so special live. Take the lovelorn "Mojo Pin", with its dreamily insistent guitar motif that sounds like it's been beamed in from the edge of sleep or "Eternal Life" which starts off like the most depressed Hendrix reflection then turns inward into a drama-filled confrontation with his own mortality.

  Buckley's version of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" is a fine example of what I was on about earlier, his cavalier approach to creating time-stopping, wonderous moments.

  He actually picks out the individual instruments from the thick mesh of the "Astral Weeks" big-band arrangement and wails, hollers, cries, and croons their parts. Somehow, none of the churning urgency of the original is lost. It could so easily be a grand folly but isn't, simply because of his sheer brass-neck, his intuitive knowledge of what made the song so brilliant in the first place and the small fact that he could sing the wallet out of Pavarotti's back pocket.

  I get blank looks trying to order a vodka in Paris, but I think "Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin" is one of those heart-destroying paeans to lost youth that only the frogs-Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel (I know he's Belgian) knock out so lovingly.

  Jeff Buckley has created one of the albums of the year with just a Telecaster and a voice that sounds like a choirboy singing from the rafters of a whorehouse. Buy it and melt.

MAT SMITH