Electric Lounge review

Austin American Statesman: December 8, 1994

By Don McLeese, music

  TUESDAY: After Jeff Buckley's previous visits to the Cactus Cafe and Chicago House, his performance at the Electric Lounge was his first at an Austin rock club and first since the release of his amazing Grace album. His opening was a stunner, a sensual tone poem of atmospheric drone and butterfly vocal swoops, offered as extended foreplay for the multiorgasmic crescendos of Mojo Pin. Rapturously romantic, Buckley plainly aspires to a transcendence beyond words, riffs or musical progression.

  For all the boundless ambition of his artistry, the material that he borrows on Grace (from Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah to the seductive standard Lilac Wine) is generally stronger than his own. While he's likely to develop more craft in his writing-and push beyond the Zeppelin homage of so much of his band's dynamics-he'll have trouble matching the intensity of these formative performances in the close confines of clubs such as the Electric Lounge.

  The slow build and soft sell through which Columbia Records is marketing Buckley suggests a career commitment, a recognition of a popular potential that is as impressive as his vocal range. When he gets where he's going, those who saw an early show such as this will remember it as a blessed event.

Austin American Statesman

February 8, 1994

By Don McLeese

  Three songs into Friday's set, the man leaned over the bar at the Cactus Cafe (a guy who sees more singer-songwriters in a year than I'd wish on anyone in a lifetime) and said, "I don't get it." Jeff Buckley was in the midst of another out-of-body vocal progression-wordless transport, in which the sound of his keening tenor seemed to have a soul of its own-which would soon resolve itself into one of his impressionistic, off-kilter, out-of-focus songs.

  While the performance made plenty of converts among the curious full house at the Cactus-where Buckley made his Austin debut opening for Alejandro Escovedo-there were predictable pockets of resistance. First off, his arrival in town was preceded by some glowing national raves: "Very few young musicians have arrived on the New York scene with the impact of Jeff Buckley," says a five-page feature in the new Musician, while a live review in the current Rolling Stone gushes, "Jeff Buckley can get away with anything."

  Such notice is heady stuff for an artist who has yet to release a full-length album, but it also suggests the sort of flavor-of-the-month fashionability to which Austin is so determinedly resistant. Beyond that, Buckley (who also played Chicago House on Saturday) comes from a very different strain than the Austin school of singer-songwriting, where a certain amount of verbal agility and deadpan cleverness can excuse a lack of musical innovation. Working within tight, traditional strictures, few Austin wordsmiths pay much attention to melodic invention when it's so easy to borrow a tune. The results are as durable and comfortable as a flannel shirt, but too rarely do they startle in the manner that Buckley's performance did.

  In Buckley's music, the risks demand a leap of faith, an immersion into that stream of subconsciousness where whatever the songs mean is less important than how they feel. With his vocal tremble and corrosively metal-edged guitar, he offered bracing contrasts, brittle juxtapositions, a rapturous romanticism that was as nakedly vulnerable as open-heart surgery.

  Though the 26-year-old son of the late Tim Buckley has the intensity and acrobatic vocal range of his father, he has more often drawn comparison with the Van Morrison of Astral Weeks (whose Sweet Thing climaxed Buckley's Cactus performance) and the Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin III. The crucial difference is that where the young Plant always sounded so full of himself, Buckley seems to lose himself when he sings, while pushing his music into areas where he isn't quite sure what he'll find.