Tim Buckley
Starsailor

THE REVIEW

A flight, which with every beat of its wings rises, glorious and immense, that for every constellation crossed falls into the blackest abysses, brushing against death.

Tim Buckley's voice was this, and much more, Tim Buckley's voice could be anything, and this is the album that proves it. After the folk beginnings and the gradual evolution towards a new song-form, after jazz and heroin, after that immense void that is Lorca, a true point of no return, Tim Buckley burns everything he has produced and meticulously recomposes its ashes. And the result is Starsailor: acidic, free, at once pitch-black and luminous.

It is not exactly a cohesive album, each song stands alone, the tracks are enormous monuments rising between pauses of silence, never touching each other. There is the blues of "Come Here Woman", but it's a desperate blues sung by a man who is drowning, dragged below the surface of the deepest ocean by invisible tentacles. And then there is the light, the immense light of dawn, and the world awakens, barely touched by a trumpet and a guitar in perfect symbiosis in "I Woke Up". And the Chaos, Buckley's primordial screams, "Monterey", a track where the voice truly takes center stage, inhuman and disfigured, howling and bleeding, torn by a riff almost punk in its simplicity.

And then, Buckley of the beginnings returns. But "Moulin Rouge" is only a pause, necessary to recuperate before the leap into the void. "Song To The Siren": the sea, the open and boundless sea, and the last rays of the sun illuminate the rock, on which she sits. And adrift, a wreck of a thousand shipwrecks, Buckley raises his lament, but something in the distance screams, echoes of hope, echoes of death. And the fire that devastates all returns, in "Jungle Fire" finally the voice rises, free yet so claustrophobically closed in on itself, attempts to take flight, but it is burdened, it is wounded, almost falls. "Starsailor" is the point of arrival. From the abyss to the end of the universe, now pure spirit, the voice divides into its infinite parts, and is reflected in an endless play of refractions.

And then, Hell. "The Healing Festival" cannot be defined in any other way. Orgy of winds, percussion, and God knows what else, and that voice, that same voice we saw rise to the heavens, has now fallen back to Earth, purified and ready to abandon itself once more to earthly sins, now leads the dances of this pagan rite. And we have truly returned to the ground, Buckley has already achieved his goal, has already seen, touched, heard the infinite. And so he can afford a light closure with "Down By The Borderline", of course treated with the usual mastery, and above all with great trumpet solos.

Starsailor is the unattainable, and the way to get there, Starsailor is not a difficult or easy album, it is not rock, it is not jazz, it is not even music. It is a course charted at great cost by the navigator of the stars, to allow art to reach dizzying heights, to allow man to become equal to the Gods.