Jeff Buckley - Grace

Another great album that Rolling Stone dismissed when it came out. Am I just 30 years late in realizing they seem to hate anything that’s not already a platinum-seller? In the years when alt rock was taking over the charts, the main criticism they could come up for Grace was essentially “this isn’t the next great alt rock thing we were hoping for. Meh.” This album was moderately successful on release, but took off into another stratosphere after Buckley’s untimely death. I’ll bet the 20th anniversary RS review was glowing.

Spotify’s writeup calls this album “Van Morrison meets Led Zeppelin”, which seems to be a common refrain, at least in the larger publications. Now I’m no 70’s kid, but I know a thing or two about Zep and Van - that comparison sounds pretty lazy to me, mainly true on the surface level and only at times. Sure, there’s the occasional Zeppelin-esque guitar riff or strumming part on Grace. And there are some arrangements that recall Van Morrison here and there. You could also squint your ears and hear Robert Plant in a few of the high-register screams on songs like “Grace.” And I think the legend is made even stronger by the fact that Buckley was said to be last seen singing a Zeppelin song while swimming under a bridge the night he passed away. But there’s so much more here, enough that even a comparison to Zep is doing the music a disservice because it shoehorns Buckley into a box that doesn’t fit.

Now don’t get me wrong - any album billed as Van Morrison meets Led Zeppelin will immediately have all of my attention. So sure, keep using that comparison to introduce completely new listeners to Jeff Buckley if you want. But I don’t think there should be many deep-dives exploring those comparisons, because they’d be reaching at best, making shit up at worst. Buckley’s music is something entirely his own.

Jeff Buckley sounds like an artist searching for the absolute limits of his voice, experimenting with anything and everything to see what creates the thinnest possible veil between his brain and the listener. Listen to this one with good headphones - every nuance you can catch adds an extra little hit of emotion when you’re least expecting it, and you can put yourself into the same headspace that Buckley seems to have on the album cover, listening to the music and forgetting the world.

From the roundup Jamwise #46 - Best Albums of 1994.