Month: December 2019

Do you know what really gets my goat? Every bloody Christmas in Australia we’re inundated with “white Christmas” imagery from England and America while, in our own backyard, it’s hotter than a shearer’s armpit. As I write this, it’s 42 degrees outside and half the shops are covered in frosted snow flakes and reindeer. Wake up, Australia! So in the interest of further developing our national identity, for this week’s record I’ve selected Paul Kelly’s excellent new greatest hits anthology as a representation of his tear-jerker of an Aussie Christmas Carol, How to Make Gravy. Written from the perspective of an incarcerated man writing a letter home before Christmas, How to Make Gravy reads like a laundry list of Australian Christmas; Eating a roast in hundred degree heat? Check. Tomato sauce in the gravy for extra tang? Check. Your drunken uncle hitting on your girlfriend while you’re losing your mind in jail? Classic. And of course being a Paul Kelly song, his keen eye for detail, folksy charm and gift for communicating subtlety and emotional nuance all help to make this song a crown jewel in his ouvre.

As I researched this review, I began to realise that everybody who I had spoken to had a very distinct visual memory of where they were the first time that they heard Grace – a memory they treated with the kind of reverence reserved for other coming-of-age milestones like their first kiss or the first time they got drunk. Grace radiates a strange spirituality, a special kind of magic that is difficult to explain. Central to its mystique is Jeff Buckley himself, the prodigious songbird who recorded just one record and died young a few years later, drowning in the Mississippi River. Jeff’s most potent gift, a feverish wail that could shift from breathy falsetto to siren-like howl with the ease of a bird taking flight, is the centrepiece of Grace. It’s a rare talent that can connect as deeply with a listener as Buckley does and as his tone shifts from choirboy to chanteuse to wailing rock god, a deep sense of intimacy prevails. At times, Buckley’s anguished cries give you the sense that he is suffering greatly, giving Grace an almost Passion-of-the-Christ-like quality that, coupled with his early death, contributes to the sacred, ethereal quality that permeates Grace.