Jeff Buckley - 1994 - Grace [EAC - FLAC]

Jeff Buckley - 1994 - Grace [EAC - FLAC]

Tracks
01 - Mojo Pin Buckley, Lucas 5:42
02 - Grace Buckley, Lucas 5:22
03 - Last Goodbye Buckley 4:35
04 - Lilac Wine Shelton 4:32
05 - So Real Buckley, Tighe 4:43
06 - Hallelujah Cohen 6:53
07 - Lover, You Should've Come Over Buckley 6:43
08 - Corpus Christi Carol Britten 2:56
09 - Eternal Life Buckley 4:52
10 - Dream Brother Buckley, Grondahl, Johnson 5:26


I can’t decide if Grace is the second or first greatest album I’ve heard that was released in 1994. Its opponent is The Holy Bible by the Manic Street Preachers, but the two albums could hardly be more different. The Holy Bible was once described as “self-lacerating punk fury” and I’ve said that it’s the most harrowing album I’ve ever heard - but Grace is just something else. It famously includes an English hymn dating from the Middle Ages as one of its tracks, a notoriously complex and cryptic Leonard Cohen cover which has become legendary in its own right, and also a song that actually wouldn’t sound completely out of place on the aforementioned Manics album, now I think of it - which gives you an idea of how incredibly varied and ambitious Buckley and his colleagues were when they set to work on Grace in 1993. The story surrounding Buckley’s demise is often retold but I shall briefly tell it again for those who are unfamiliar with it. Buckley completed the Grace tour in 1996, and on May 29th 1997, went for a swim in Wolf River Harbour, a tributary of the Mississippi River. Sucked underwater by a powerful undercurrent, Buckley drowned, and his body was found some time later. At the time of his death Buckley had been working on a future album entitled My Sweetheart the Drunk, which was released in an incomplete state as Sketches For My Sweetheart the Drunk in 1998. Buckley purists like myself, however, would argue (with some justification) that Grace is Buckley’s only album and the one by which his talent as a musician should be judged.

“Mojo Pin” is the album’s first song and comes across as a clear statement of intent. Across dreamlike acoustic, Buckley’s ethereal voice murmurs its way into the song in the opening seconds, forming a very memorable album opening. The main lyrics that follow are sung in a beautifully quiet and subtle way, and the dreamy atmosphere is maintained with gentle drums joining in. Throughout the song this formula is interspersed with slightly heavier and more urgent sections, until eventually a muscular riff and heavy drums kick in for a few seconds, and then over some more wordless vocals from Buckley, it all falls away again. And then everything comes back in heavier still, with Buckley sounding more passionate and forceful than ever. The song is so varied but so controlled throughout that it’s hard not to be taken in and absorbed by it. Supposedly it’s about heroin, but Buckley always claimed it was about a dream (both would make sense) - but Jeff’s not around to ask so perhaps we will never know.

The title track, “Grace”, comes next, soon entering a joyous electric guitar opening, and the song goes into its story of, as Buckley himself described it, the loss of fear about mortality when true love has been achieved. Again, it’s a very varied song, with some lovely guitar sections to spice things up, and effects like the ticking of clocks are placed cleverly to complement Buckley’s voice, which by this point is really sounding amazingly impressive. Grace was released as a single.

Next up is “Last Goodbye” which was deservedly another of the album’s singles and in fact, Buckley’s most financially successful single. Again the simple guitars and drums template opens the song, but it’s very effectively and appealingly done. The second verse is perhaps particularly amazingly sung, but it’s very hard to choose exceptional Buckley passages when there are so many. As the title suggests the song is about the end of a relationship. The line “Did you say - ‘no, this can’t happen to me’” is one of my favourites on the album given its superb delivery. There’s something incredibly passionate and emotive about it, but it’s just one line of an enormously impressive album.

“Lilac Wine” is a cover - in fact basically all the versions of it anyone’s likely to have heard (by Elkie Brooks, Nina Simone and Katie Melua to name but three) are covers of the song originally written by James Shelton. It’s one of the slowest and most subtle songs on the album, and as such it takes quite a while to really sink in and let you appreciate it - but as ever some of the lines are delivered incredibly well. Despite the slow pace the whole thing seems to have an amazing epic momentum about it. Beautiful.

“So Real” comes next, and was understandably also released as Grace’s third single. Its title was also used for this year’s Buckley retrospective collection. It is quite dark and moody, with a rising and falling tempo and some haunting lyrics (”The wind blew an invocation…”). The real highlight is the latter renditions of the chorus, with Buckley’s (again) passionate delivery and the thunderous drums and especially cymbals. The quiet-to-loud-and-back-again mechanic returns on this song as well.

That legendary Leonard Cohen cover, “Hallelujah” comes in at track 6. At almost seven minutes long, it’s the longest on the album by a small margin. It’s fairly hard to overestimate how acclaimed Buckley’s rendition is in popular musical thought. Apparently based largely on John Cale’s version, Buckley’s is stripped down to its emotional core, centred around his own always-beautiful vocals. The song’s inherent quality is its lyrics - meandering, Biblical and outright wonderful, they formed an ideal core of material that Buckley was able to cut down and use (some versions of Cohen’s original lyrics included as many as 15 verses) as an amazing testbed for his voice. There’s something about the simplicity and subtlety of the arrangements that allows Buckley’s very special delivery of some of the intensely powerful moments in the song and creates something that is genuinely wonderful and unique. There’s rarely a mood you can be in where listening to “Hallelujah” seems like an unwelcome prospect - it can be read as melancholy, joyous and praising, or simply cryptic and thoughtful. Happily, Buckley’s version results in one of those experiences (like Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” full-length version for instance) which is difficult and probably unwise to attempt to capture in words - to do so is somehow to attempt to deconstruct something that was specifically made the way it is, in much the same way that great poetry can have its meaning and impact crippled by futile over-analysis. In short, “Hallelujah” forms a magnificent core to the album.

Next up is “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” which is nearly as long as “Hallelujah” but is a different beast almost entirely. It begins with some mournful organ which is appropriate for the lyrics of the first verse which describe a funeral in the midst of a rainstorm. Buckley states, “Maybe I’m too young / to keep good love from going wrong”. He expresses his feelings of wishing he could be with a lover, and the inescapable nature of his situation. The song builds very slowly, becoming more complex and emotional with each passing verse, and the climax four minutes in when Buckley repeatedly exclaims, “It’s never over” is superb.

Up next is the song’s shortest and most religion-inspired song, “Corpus Christi Carol”. It’s based on Benjamin Britten’s version of the Middle Ages English hymn, and is difficult to get used to at first, but soon you realise how incredibly, monumentally beautiful it is. Buckley’s vocals are just astonishingly poised and delicate - it’s hard to imagine any other performer in popular music who could possibly have pulled the whole thing off - wonderful.

The hardest song on the album, influenced by some of Buckley’s angrier feelings, is “Eternal Life”. It soon launches into a grungey riff and you know this is wildly different territory from the previous track. Each line is delivered with a righteous anger and venom, without becoming excessively theatrical. It’s clear that Buckley’s feelings aren’t all angry, however, as he declares “All I want to do is love everyone”. The section where “There’s no time for hatred / only questions” is sung over a quiet background before those questions are forcefully asked over the harder backing is fantastic stuff.

Track ten (and possibly the last track, but we’ll come onto that) is “Dream Brother”. I really can’t claim to know what the song is about, but supposedly it was written by Buckley as a warning to a friend about not walking out on a pregnant girlfriend. Regardless, the song has some slightly disconcerting images in it and conjures a very engaging, mystical atmosphere.

If you have an old version of Grace, that’s it, that’s your ten tracks. Later versions, however, have an eleventh and final track - “Forget Her”. It’s a moving song about having broken up with a lover whose love was not what it seemed. I personally find songs that fade out slightly annoying so it loses points for that, but overall this is yet another amazing song on the album - one passage in particular is especially excellent.

Frankly, Grace is one of the best albums I’ve ever heard. It’s hard to not go on and on about how amazing Buckley’s voice is, especially when words frequently fail to describe it. But ultimately it’s that voice that forms the core of the album’s compositions, and it is astonishingly impressive with almost alarming regularity. Buckley’s musicians do themselves extremely proud, always providing backing to Buckley that is always proportional to the situation in the songs. The album is quite an exhausting experience - sometimes it feels quite heavy going, and is hardly an album that you’d listen to all the time (with the possible exception of songs like “Last Goodbye”, “So Real” and “Eternal Life”) but it is one that you find yourself returning to frequently, most often because you feel the need to listen to a specific masterpiece like “Hallelujah” or “Dream Brother” - but in all probability you will find yourself listening to the whole thing, just getting immersed in it. A masterwork, and a far more rewarding purchase than any Buckley compilation. Essential.