Mystery White Boy

IT'S HARD to believe Jeff Buckley was ever here at all, as if some pre-pubescent Bronte sister merely invented him for our benefit. Somehow, lightning sizzled over the same gene pool twice in a lifetime: not only could junior boast the same bone structure as his old man, but an even more mercurial talent; a drunken nightingale warble which bore comparison with white witches like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Robert Plant and Nina Simone. Whew!

Mind you, Buckley had his detractors, not all of them sour-pusses who believed the boy too pretty to be as pained as he sounded. The singer's own compositions were frequently epical but unfinished, meandering vehicles for that stabbed-seraph wail. Yes, when Buckley and band's energies were channeled into set-pieces like the Presence-era Zep-estry of 'Grace' or 'Mojo Pin' they were truly stunning, but the guy's name was largely made through ghostly adaptations of standards like 'Lilac Wine' or 'Corpus Christi Carol'.

All the same, most of this scrupulously constructed live album is based around melodramatic originals such as 'Dream Brother' (from Cure/Cocteau Twins shoegazing to 'Kashmir'-style pyrotechnics over the course of eight minutes), or the hyper-venting arm-carvery of 'I Woke Up In A Strange Place'. And while Buckley's lyrics can suggest yet another self-obsessed American space cadet - Adam Duritz with better instincts - even the clunkiest of his prose flows like honey when animated by that uncanny voice.

Such emotional grandstanding is contrasted by a series of elegant and economic covers: the exquisite medley of Leonard's 'Hallelujah' and The Smiths' 'I Know It's Over', and on the extra limited edition disc, Nina Simone's 'That's All I Ask'. Even more poignantly, clock the thrilling - if long-winded - take on Alex Chilton's 'Kanga Roo', a tune once tackled by This Mortal Coil around about the same time they also transposed Buckley senior's 'Song To The Siren' into authentic celestial music.

It's only now, after the sun has set on Jeff Buckley's legacy, that we can gauge the length of his shadow. Thankfully, Mystery White Boy, like Nirvana Unplugged In New York, is less a diehard's trophy than a substantial footnote to an abandoned body of work. Strong stuff.