"Grace": Jeff Buckley's great album

First, we must not forget to mention Jeff Buckley’s father, Tim Buckley, who was an astonishing and strange singer, and who, like all good ‘60s cult figures, died young of a drug overdose. This bears mentioning because Jeff, though he barely knew the man, not only looks eerily like him and has a similarly amazing voice, but also seems to have inherited his father’s painfully romantic and troubled spirit, and more astonishing, his fate, since Jeff died at the age of 31.

Jeff’s album “Grace” (1994), which is his first effort with a full band, begins in a mist of reverberated guitars out of which emerges his soft vocal improvisations—haunted, almost feminine, and full of an other-worldly longing. By the time the first song (“Mojo Pin”) is finished, you’ve been led through a maze of shifting tempos and dynamics, from jazzy and ethereal grooves to a wild pain-drenched bridge.

Buckley is setting out to invent a songform that can shift as suddenly as emotions do, and that ultimately can capture everything from bliss to deep fear in a flash.

The band (Mick Grondahl on bass, Matt Johnson on drums) does a fine job of following the impulses of the songs. When it works, for example on songs like “Mojo Pin,” and “So Real” (the latter of which throws in a brief bad-trip section that sounds like about 20 seconds of Blue Cheer), the effect is simply riveting.

But the disc contains such a wide range of other material, including more standard blue-eyed soul/pop (“Last Goodbye”), a heartbroken torch song (“Lilac Wine”), a traditional folk ballad (“Corpus Christie Carol”), and so on, that, though quite beautiful, leaves the aesthetic of the project a bit too open-ended.

There’s even a quasi rocker, “Eternal Life,” which slams in convincingly enough, but ends up sounding something like a choirboy singing over a grunge track.

Really, a voice as clear and flexible as his is best suited to ethereal settings that give it room for subtle modulation. Beginning with a nervous sigh, Buckley launches into a stunning solo interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” where the match of singer and song is absolutely perfect. It conveys the spiritualized love of the born romantic, of one who feels too deeply and remembers too much, and a ballad like this in the hands of someone as gifted as Jeff Buckley is truly “such stuff as dreams are made of.”