Grace

At 1:30 this morning, I decided to revisit Jeff Buckley's Grace, the defining album of a good year of my life back in high school; my sophomore year I believe. It was one of the big transitional records for me in terms of expanding my musical palette and not just listening to the same old 90's alternative retreads. However, when certain reviewing criteria became imprinted in my brain, I found myself dismissing the emotional charms of this album because I reasoned that when you got down to it, the album consisted of a bunch of slow, hookless songs that all kind of sounded the same. Well, I think I was wrong. Anyways, a review:

All great albums need a certain unquantifiable 'artistic vision'. Most albums have a generic sound, and other albums try to rebel against the status quo and fall flat on their faces. A good album will have at the least its own personality whereas a great album will have its own vision. Jeff Buckley's Grace very obviously has its own personality. If one tried to describe it, one would have a hard time pointing to a genre it was supposed to fit into. To a lot of people, it will sound like dull, meandering music, which in a certain sense it is. A lot of the album is based around pretty ballads that don't have any particular melody, forcing the listener to be enthralled by Buckley's voice and lyrics, or else suffocate from the boredom. Yet right away this initial description leaves a lot out of the picture. Jeff Buckley, as a songwriter, favored a sort of spontaneous catharsis, preferring to utilize a lot of heavy dynamic shifts. The ethereal backing on some of the songs suddenly gives way into a louder, rocking sound as Buckley moves from a whisper to a fiery wail. At this point, the genre is impossible to discern. Grace falls into the rock category somewhere, with its emphasis on intricate guitar lines, but moves everywhere from an atonal detuned guitar section in "So Real" to a cover of a 50's pop standard ("Lilac Wine"), while still sort of sounding the same.
Being so hard to mark down, Grace has personality, which is the first step towards a great album. However, Jeff Buckley (who drowned before releasing a 2nd album) did not secure a lasting legacy because of an album where he took a big first step towards being great. He commands a fawning fanbase of rock critics because this one album was indeed a great one. Why great? Because it manages to succeed without any hooks, any pop trappings. The melodies are not the point; Buckley's songwriting is based strictly around the ebb and flow of the song. He often eschews traditional song structure, following whatever the hell pattern he feels like. What results is that most of the songs on the album contain something intangibly magical; at least one sublime moment that suddenly transforms a boring love song into an emotional tour de force. Maybe it's the voice, as Buckley was a vocal talent without peer. Listen to "Lilac Wine," where he captures raw emotion in each note, taking his beautiful, but unsettling voice to new heights. Maybe it's the lyrics, which are fairly poetic, and tell the same old broken-heart stories in fresh ways. Most likely though, it appears that Buckley just had an inner sense that told him when (and how) to raise and diffuse the tension of a song, building things up to create masterpieces of mood, to capture the spontaneous catharsis that he had envisioned. And it is this vision that makesGrace a great album, even if the second half is weaker than the first, even if all the songs do kind of sound the same. It comes across beautifully on its own terms, and there's not too much more to ask for besides that.