Grace
10 February 2010
It’s a snow day today, which is maybe the best kind of day, so I decided to write a review of a CD I got at the library. The CD is Grace, by Jeff Buckley. I was always getting confused between Jeff Buckley and Jeff Beck and Beck and Tim Buckley, and I thought maybe listening to this would be a way to start sorting that out. I know nothing about the guy except I guess he died tragically? Drowned in the Mississippi, AMG says.
Anyway, there’s a picture of him on the front cover holding an old-fashioned microphone and looking sort of oily and insufferable, and another picture of him on the back cover jumping up some stairs, or perhaps (it is a confusing picture) floating down the stairs headfirst like the ghost of Christmas 1994. In the liner notes are further pictures of him, in which he looks like that guy that had a band in high school, and maybe you had a crush on a girl but that girl had a crush on this guy because he had this band, and you felt unworthy disliking him because you were probably just jealous over the girl and besides he was so very gentle and encouraging, but actually you could never really tell what was the value in him.
He begins the album by saying, “Woooo” repeatedly, perhaps building on the ghost theme. Shortly after that he says, “If only you’d come back to me,” and then some other things.
Often the music threatens to become jazzy, and while it would be too much to say I automatically dislike anything that calls itself jazz, I’m talking here about really jazzy jazz, like there might be some rich balding guy with loafers bobbing his head over a piano and everyone is nodding at each other.
It isn’t bad music. It seems like he’s set out to be sublime. So he’s written sublime songs and he has a sublime voice and the production is striving for sublimity, but the only thing he has to say is, “Look at me, I am sublime.”
In the middle of the album he sings a Leonard Cohen song, which is nice, and then some of the songs after that are also nicer I think than the songs at the beginning of the album, although maybe I only think that because the songs at the beginning have broken me down somehow. In any case by the end I am almost sold on him, but then if I start from the beginning again I am immediately unsold. For some reason he makes me think of red cellophane.
Comments (1)
I think you’ve found your true calling.