JEFF BUCKLEY

GRACE (Columbia, 1994)

In the early 80s Jeff Buckley’s first band, Mahre Bukham, would tear into Rush’s The Spirit Of Radio and Yes’ Long Distance Runaround with precocious skill and teenage fervour. The singer/guitarist called such songs “thinking man’s music”.

Born in 1966 and raised in Orange County, Buckley loved the good stuff like Rush, Yes, and Genesis, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell. Later, studying guitar at Hollywood’s Musicians Institute, he would lock himself away and soak up the work of Al Di Meola, Allan Holdsworth, and Pat Metheny. He appreciated the rich harmonic language of Bartók, Ravel, Duke Ellington. So when he eventually upped sticks to New York to pursue his art, he was never going to make a conventional rock record.

Grace would be Buckley’s only LP (he drowned three years after its release, aged just 30) and although it went on to be hailed as a classic album, it was a slow burner. On its release in 1994 some reviewers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Some judged the record on Buckley’s impossible physical beauty and Byronic charm, dismissing it as indie-schmindie college rock. Inconveniently for the hacks, his music didn’t really chime with the prevailing grunge scene, and wasn’t quite alt-rock either.

Buckley could belt with the best of them, but also had the most exquisite, almost operatic falsetto. His guitar playing was angular, edgy, but never too shreddy, and Grace’s darkly romantic songs were imbued with a questing spirit. If at a genetic level this owed something to the artist’s late, estranged father Tim Buckley, it owed more to the music that charged up his youth.

Written with ex-Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas, Grace’s brooding, oblique opener Mojo Pin slides restlessly between scales, its unorthodox chords never quite landing where expected. It rises and falls, flows and recedes, with Buckley’s dynamic vocal performance coming from a sublime place. The title track itself is unconventional too, with a proto-math rock guitar hook and clever descending verse structure. Buckley’s almost corporal, theatrical delivery elevates the whole to a higher artistic plane.

In the sexy break-up tune Last Goodbye (its stunning string arrangement by Karl Berger, who worked with John McLaughlin and, later, Coheed And Cambria), and in Buckley’s definitive, heara-pin-drop take on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (270m Spotify hits and counting), the parallels with other proggy bands are clear.

Thom Yorke, Matt Bellamy and Bruce Soord are just three artists who share Buckley’s performative DNA. So Real’s wailing fuzz guitar break could be Jonny Greenwood, and the enigmatic intro of Dream Brother (covered by TesseracT on their 2012 EP Perspective) wouldn’t be out of place on a Steven Wilson record.

“There’s scads and scads of music out there,” Buckley said once. “Amazing things that will give you inspiration, really strange things that you need to be open enough to find. You can’t be closed-minded about it.”

Grace is thinking (wo)man’s music, made by a thinking man.