Various
Dream Brother: The Songs Of Tim + Jeff Buckley (Rykodisc)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, February 3, 2006

Jeff Buckley met his father, late-’60s/early-’70s singer Tim, exactly once, and he spent his career avoiding, as much as possible, trading on his father’s cult fame. But both performers strained against genre boundaries with astonishing and expressive voices, and neither one lived past 30 – Tim died of a heroin overdose, Jeff drowned in the Wolf River – guaranteeing that the legacies of the two would be inextricably linked. Rykodisc’s Dream Brother tribute continues to conflate the two, treating their albums as chapters in one continuous catalogue. Among those choosing a folkie approach, Adem uses a single acoustic guitar to capture the hypnotic swirl of Jeff’s full-band original of “Mojo Pin,” but Micah P. Hinson’s Woody Guthrie approach to “Yard Of Blonde Girls” simplifies the song in the wrong way, turning it into a jolly foot-tapper. More interesting things happen with the album’s more drastically altered arrangements, with the Earlies’ “I Must Have Been Blind” evokes Super Furry Animals in their slower, druggier moments and Engineers turning “Song Of The Siren” into a mystically gorgeous My Bloody Valentine-esque wash of noise. But ultimately, Dream Brother would honor the work of both men better by seeing them as individuals, rather than as a son who completed the story begun by the father.

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