Jeff Buckley: Songs To No One: 1991-1992 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In the early nineties, two restlessly inventive musicians, Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas, both haunted by phantoms from the Sixties, crossed a generation gap and made a ghostly sound together. Lucas had been a guitarist for blues freak Captain Beefheart; Buckley was the immensely talented singer-songwriter son of the late, great singer-songwriter Tim Buckley. These raw recordings, culled from studio sessions, rehearsal tapes and live performances, capture their brief encounter. The album opens with "Hymne l'Amour," a long, spooky jam, where Buckley communes with the trance music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, one of his most cherished influences. As they flirt with disparate sounds and disciplines, Buckley and Lucas gracefully dance between sacred tradition and musical adventure: As Buckley croons the warped blues of "Harem Man," the tune shimmers like a telegram from the Mississippi Delta filtered through both psychedelia and alt-rock. The younger man would go on to stretch folk and art rock to its limits, before dying tragically in 1997. Songs to No One is less a conventional album than an imperfect premonition of greatness.