9. Jeff Buckley -- Grace Whatever I was doing in 1994 (graduating high school, working at Taco Hell, beginning college, etc), I wasn't listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace. Or much of anything else, to be honest; I approached the rhapsodized early-90's music scene with equal parts attraction, confusion, and mockery. My big purchase that year was Green Day's Dookie (on cassette, so it won't appear in this retrospective). I never even heard of the guy for nearly twelve years; when Spin put him on their Top 100 Albums of the 20 years they'd been in existence. I liked the cover art, which reminded me of a more grownup Sid Vicious, I liked the name, so I checked it out. And I didn't know what to make of it.
Every time I've listened to it since, I've had the same reaction. It certainly defies categorization, or even adjectivization. I want to call it Operatic Rock, by which I mean nothing like Rock Opera. I want to call it Dream Pop. I want to call it the Perfect Album to Take a Nap To, but I've never taken a nap to it.
Every time you get comfy, lulled by the dulcet tones, light orchestral frills, and Buckley's sharp yet soothing vocals, in comes a big loud blues guitar riff, rumbling into the song like a kraken from the deep, and with a clattering of booming drums churns the song into a perfect storm before sliding back beneath the waves of gentler arrangements. Sometimes there are even nodes to the bang-bang rock-n' roll of the era, as in the fuzz-tone breakdown on "So Real".
Indeed, Grace's very oddity makes it definitively a product of the 1990's. It's hard to imagine anyone at Columbia Records green-lighting this project in any era other than the immediate aftermath of grunge, in that year-one, anything goes mentality that Nirvana et. al briefly brought about. And truth be told, "Eternal Life," the penultimate track, would have been comfortable on any Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots disc of the time. But usually I'm too caught up in trying to process what's being offered to my ears to notice.
Buckley's most downloaded song on both iTunes and Amazon is his cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" that appears on this album. I find this strange given that most of us first encounter that song in another version, by Rufus Wainwright, as part of the montage that almost convinced us that Shrek had soul. It's also Wainwright's most popular iTunes song (and for that matter, Cohen's). Either version has merit: Wainwright takes a minimalist stance, allowing niether the lyrics nor the melody to gain the upper hand, but complement each other in the sparseness of bleak joy. Buckley's version is lovelier, softer and yet more impassioned, and if you've spent any time whing about how Shrek ruined the song for you, it's a welcome re-hearing.
As much as I can praise this record, I don't gin it up very often. I almost never listen to it in the car, which is where I do 90% of my CD listening. Finely crafted as it is, the mood for it comes but rarely. It would seem most ideal for a summer day with an unexpected rainshower, or a morning with a light hangover. But just listening it today, on Day 3 of a Spring rain after I'd forgotten to set the clocks forward, the strength of it made me shift the grade upwards from a tepid OK. That says a good deal more than if I had pretended that it was the best thing I'd ever heard.
Grade: L
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