By Marty Hughley of The Oregonian staff
Rumor has it that sales of Jeff Buckley's "Grace" have shot up in the past week, equaling about one-tenth of the total from the album's previous eight months in the racks.
If you're looking for a reason, you'll probably find it at your grocery checkout. Buckley, the 28-year-old son of the cult hero folkie Tim Buckley, has been annointed as one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."
On the one hand, Buckley deserves the attention-for his music as much as for his cheekbones. On the other, fans attracted by his dreamy eyes might be daunted by the challenges of his dreamy yet unpredictable music. As Buckley's Monday night performance at the Aladdin Theatre showed, he's not for the faint of attention span. Buckley has described his work as "part quagmire, part structure" and at times his songs seem to wander in place, as if that quagmire were home. But when he does throw out a good hook, it's enough to pull his performance up to peaks of crystalline beauty and intensity that make it worth waiting through the lulls.
Standing off to the side of his three backing musicians, the singer-guitarist built his songs from moments of aching delicacy to peaks of bold declaration and paroxysms of noisy release. Covers of Leonard Cohen's bittersweet, elegiac "Hallelujah" and MC5's proto-punk "Kick Out the Jams" served as stylistic bookends.
In between he traced his own distinct musical vision in a remarkable high tenor informed by Indian microtones, soul melisma and the honey-dripping jazz phrasing of Nina Simone. Sliding in and out of his smooth falsetto, he drew phrases out like streamers, especially on "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," "So Real," and "Grace."
He gives these romantic reveries a yearning intensity, a dark sensuality that seems to feed off introspection as much as connection. Whereas even the most enlightened rockers seek transcendence in the heights of carnal knowledge, Buckley seems to touch grace in the afterglow.
After all, it's that kind of sensation that lingers long after this week's People is off the racks.
The opening act, a Los Angeles quartet called Soul Coughing, made an odd match with Buckley's dusky passions. Using drums, double bass, a sampler keyboard and occasional guitar, the band pressed out a dense blend of hip-hop, funk, rock and jazz as both cushion and launching pad for M. Doughty's oddball hipster raps. A lanky cross between a junior beat poet and a suburban B-boy wannabe, Doughty trades in inspired non sequiturs and vaguely disquieting images of modern social dislocation.
But the smart use of the sampler for thick textures, colorful riffs, and comic asides, and the rhythm section's balance of warmth and wallop, created a consistent and engaging musical character for Doughty to inhabit.
