greetings_from_la raze this isn't the best work tim buckley ever did in a recording studio, but it's the first album of his i heard, and my teenage mind was duly blown. it was an attempt at making music that was more commercial after tim finished alienating most of his fan base with the brilliant but uncompromising one-two punch of "lorca" and "starsailor". i spent something like three hundred bucks on an out_of_print cd copy of "starsailor" back when snagging one of those on ebay was the only way to hear the album short of finding an old vinyl copy at an estate sale. i've never regretted it for a second. the idea of any record company executive hearing the raunchy sex-funk "greetings" had to offer in 1972 and thinking there might be a hit hidden between the sweat-soaked sheets is pretty baffling. in the end, it didn't sell much better than the more cerebral stuff that came before. you can sense tim's heart isn't really in it half the time. but his voice is never less than otherworldly. and i think there are three songs here that justify and elevate the whole affair. there's "sweet surrender", which must be one of the most unflinchingly honest sets of lyrics anyone has scraped together about the toxic sprawl of serial infidelity. "hong kong bar" is an acoustic fever_dream that sounds like it shuffled in from a different album altogether. and then there's "make it right", where the desperation that's been simmering just beneath the surface of all this depravity boils over and scorches everything in sight. something must have gone wrong at the mastering stage, because on this pressing of the record that last track runs slower than it's supposed to. by a lot. it has the effect of making the whole thing sound even more defeated. today my dad opened the door just as a decelerated tim buckley was losing his mind and leaving language behind. he thought it was me. he thought i'd finally snapped. i don't know what it says about me that i took that as a compliment. but i did. 241101 what's it to you? who go blather from