The title is dissembling. Looking back five years after Jeff Buckley's untimely death, these songs are obviously juvenilia, the sound of a young man newly moved to New York from LA, trying to find a voice and wildly enthused by the fertile eccentricities of the downtown scene.
For erstwhile Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas (a talented but eternal sideman) they represented the Big Chance. That tension doomed this incarnation of Gods and Monsters, Lucas's shifting group of musicians for whom these songs were written.
Mojo Pin and Grace (which Lucas co-wrote) are familiar as key elements of Buckley's one studio album and from subsequent releases, but they remain fascinating for lovers of vocal nuance.
She Is Free is lovely in parts, but Buckley is audibly groping for melody; similarly, he struggles against Lucas's frantic, over-fussy style in Song to No One. Better are the lilting How Long Will It Take, and Hymne à l'Amour, an oceanic swell of choral beauty.
For fans, this record is fascinating; the most worthwhile of the posthumous releases to date.
