Forum Overview :: No Stairway to Heaven

Since I'm seeding this!!! I'm going to review it. Jeff Buckley, "Grace" by Zseni 09/25/2004, 9:28am PDT I'm a complete freak in a number of different ways as many longtime Zseni fans know, but one way which is not readily apparent online is my freakiness about music: if, for example, I hear Don Henley's "End of the Innocence" or Billy Joel's "For The Longest Time" I am plunged into depression instantly. I HAVE to get away. I can't stand hearing those songs. I don't know, maybe I've surpressed the memory of being violently and repeatedly raped while those songs played in the background, but they aren't the only ones! So maybe I've been raped a lot. I don't even know. There are other songs that don't make me hate life and the universe with a crushingly powerful passion, but they still get under my skin and fuck around with my head. Anyway Grace is full of songs like that. It's only because I've listened to it so much that I no longer burst into tears when listening to it now. But man, those first couple of times were rough and it's a testament to the excellence of the album that I stayed around for it. It's not really an album of sad songs, but it is a little ghostly and haunting, which works well with Jeff's eventual fate. He sings in a sobbing high tenor that glides seamlessly into falsetto and back, and the music and vocal phrasing is distinctively Southern - fans of Jump Little Children will find a lot of love - and informed equally by the jazz-folk tradition of his father (the late Tim Buckley) and the Led Zep axis of classic rock. A noteworthy absence of serious lead guitar though. The album starts with Mojo Pin, which fades in for a minute and a half gradually in milky swirls of rhythm guitar and ends on the hardest hard rock you are going to find in the next 9 songs (it isn't very hard.) A formless track, stronger as an introduction to an album than as a standalone. Next is the title track, Grace, which is a song about how very ready Jeff is to die. The bridge still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up (this is really distracting when you're trying to write about it.) Jeff the near ghost and his backup band of friends who have already crossed over. The power of the song hangs so much on the unique flexibility of his voice that I can't imagine anyone covering it without totally butchering it, so please listen to it in a Jeff Buckley version and not in one of the inevitable covers to be done by some future Avril Lavigne. Last Goodbye - you might hear this played at a shopping center. A very average slice of relationship angst presented in a way with which you are no doubt all too familiar. I like to pretend this track isn't actually on the album. Lilac Wine - leaning more into folk, if you can do folk with a full band backup. Theatrical like a showtune, quiet like the kind of music people play in ceramics labs. A song about unreadiness for love. This song and Dream Brother were the favorites of an actual ceramics-lab-attendee I knew who was between hospital stays. She comitted suicide with this song on repeat in the background. (Crazy women like Jeff Buckley.) I guessed I kind of liked that she was the kind of crazy that permitted a tasteful end, because a common person committing suicide to a Jeff Buckley song would do it to Grace. So Real - with a brief guitar solo like lawn equipment going off in the middle. Evocative of a polite singer-songwriter losing his grip on reality and descending into pathetic howls. Hallelujah, the Leonard Cohen song, comes next. When I was still crying during the album, this song and Grace and Lover, You Should Have Come Over would set me off so bad. Jeff's performance here throws the difference between Leonard Cohen's abilities as a singer and as a songwriter into sharp relief (bad, very good, respectively.) It's so potent that I actively dislike listening to this song because it's too good to enjoy, the words become too real to make it anything but harrowing. (I'm taking the bullet for you clods here.) Incidentally, I can listen to Leonard Cohen sing this song all day without feeling anything but boredom. Lover, You Should Have Come Over - very lovely, a much better piece about lonliness and relationship angst than Last Goodbye, which isn't even on this album. A perfect song about not having the person you want with you there with you. I can't say enough good stuff about the quality of Jeff's vocal work, but it becomes apparent on songs like this one and Hallelujah - other people couldn't sing these songs in a way to make them so vivid, to so impress upon people his own feelings. I do think they are his own; I don't think he is a David Bowie, an actor-singer, at all. He's really in there and he really takes you in there with him. Maybe other people have lots and lots of music that does that for them, but I think Jeff affects me uniquely in that regard. I wouldn't listen to other music that did that anyway, I don't think. I don't like the sensation at all, it's like being possessed. Jeff is a special case. Corpus Christi Carol is another cover, a pretty and quiet and still very disturbing song with a haunting melody. I'm still amazed at how he can nail those high high notes, but his dad could sing like that too (though I think Tim Buckley had a better low end, Jeff has a better high end.) Still this couldn't have been an easy song for him to sing or record. Eternal Life - when Jeff starts to rock he starts to sound a lot more like a lot of other bands and performers. I think it's a waste of his ability, although the lyrics are interesting on this song. A side effect of him sounding a lot like other people is that this and Last Goodbye are the easiest songs for me to listen to. They are also the least impressive. He rocks capably but no better than that. Dream Brother ends the album on the same ghostly fading note on which it began. Maybe if Gyorgy Ligeti mellowed out and made a folk-rock record he might have worked with Jeff Buckley and they would have done more stuff like the mid-section sustained background noise. Like Mojo Pin, this serves better as a ramp down from the album than as a standalone song, and the only person I know who would disagree is no longer with us.

Since I'm seeding this!!! I'm going to review it. Jeff Buckley, "Grace" by Zseni 09/25/2004, 9:28am PDT