Jeff Buckley
Sketches (For My Sweetheart, the Drunk) (Columbia)
Buckley was a prodigious musical talent who died last year in a swimming accident on the eve of recording the follow-up album to “Grace,” his 1994 debut. “Sketches” provides a glimpse of what that album might have sounded like. It includes studio sessions with producer Tom Verlaine and sparse demos, which encompass haunting meditations (“Nightmares by the Sea”), hard-rock stomps (“Yard of Blonde Girls”) and soul reveries (“Everybody Here Wants You”) while dabbling in electronica (“Back in New York City”). These suggest that Buckley was not so much integrating his odd patchwork of influences–Edith Piaf, Led Zeppelin, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Nina Simone–as using them as springboards for his own restless search.
