CULT RECORD: NICK DRAKE: " PINK MOON " (1972)

As lovely in photographs as Ophelia about to float down the river, with the gentlest voice and most delicate sense of phrasing to come out of the Renaisance Faire of late '60s English folk rock, Nick Drake is a perfect muse for arty girls and boys just cracking their first volume of Keats's collected letters. It helps that Drake died in the dark bloom of his youth, overdosing on antidepressants in his childhood bedroom at age 26, in 1974. It also doesn't hurt that he wrote incessantly about his growing melancholia, setting his spare verses to arrangements filigreed with cello and flute, or just his own elaborate finger-picking on guitar. Discovered by folk impresario Joe Boyd while still at Cambridge, Drake recorded his first album, Five Leaves Left, at age of twenty, but like the tubercular poet he so resembled, he already seemed aware that his time on the sod would be short.
The comparison to Keats is apt; whether consciously or not, Drake seemed to write from the Keatsian principles of negative capability and detachment: the ability to rest within mystery and not to seek answers, and the talent to leave one's ego behind and become absorbed in the fleeting beauty of the world. Many of his songs are in the second person, describing his intense loneliness and desire for communion in cool detail. The lyrics often invoke fairy tales or classic poetic images ("I never saw magic crazy as this/ I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea," he sings in "Northern Sky,"( the song from Bryter Later that many aficionados consider his apotheosis ), but they're never florid. Drake's extreme depression tempered his extreme romanticism. The songs testify both to the seductiveness of pretentious dreams and to the knowledge that such wistful hopes always fail.
Lo-fi purists should stay away from the first two albums and go directly to Pink Moon , Drake's final complete work. Only Drake's whispery vocal and forceful guitar, with an occasional dab of piano, shape these songs, whose titles are all fragments or single words. Unlike other "mad records" by artists such as Daniel Johnston or Syd Barret, Pink Moon's rough soul bears the smoothest of edges. The melodies still seduce, their execution still soothes.

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CULT RECORD:TIM BUCKLEY:"STARSAILOR"(1971)

Dead from a heroin and morphine overdose in 1975, Tim Buckley's 28 years were nonotheless packed with some extraordinary accomplishments. His influence on alternative music is rarely felt directly. Buckley was such a distinctive artist and singer that no one, save his biological son Jeff, could ever really sound like him. Yet underground experimentalists from Sun City Girls to Red House Painters are clearly in debt to Buckley for his fearless egoism and sense of musical daring. Starsailor released in 1971, gets so far inside Buckley's head it's no wonder that his last three sex drenched, white boy, funk/soul studio albums represent a collapse; he was wiped out. Buckley blithely ignores all laws of structure and pace; he trusts only his own intuition. "Song To The Siren" is the album's breathtaking bit of beauty; This Mortal Coil's 1985 cover version sparkled renewed interest in Buckley. But it's the title track that serves as Buckley's apotheosis, a wordless barrage of whoops, cries, cackles, croons, shouts, melismas, and moans that commingle into one of the most powerful demonstrations of emotional bloodletting ever recorded.

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CULT RECORD:LEONARD COHEN:"SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN"(1968)

"Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld," Kurt Cobain wishes on In Utero, "so I can sigh eternally." Cobain was hardly the first alternative figure perversely attracted to Cohen: great casts (R.E.M to Julian Cope) assembled for the tribute album I'm Your Fan, Christian Slater's Gen X misfit in Pump Up the Volume makes "Everybody Knows" his theme song, and on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack songs from The Future sound every bit as coldly '90s as companion tunes by Nine Inch Nails. (Let's just mention Nick Cave). With uncanny savvy about crudity and sophistication, Cohen has managed to remain convincing in the roles of minstrel, poet, guru, and Dylan for three rock generations now. His music may sound like an afterthought, an instabeat stage prop, but the crafting is meticulous: minor keys, piping rhythms, and non-rock flourishes that borrow as much from the intensity of prayer as the languor of the cafe concert. His lyrics-vulgar, mythopoeic, sentimental to the point of corniness, jadely dismissive-are equally performed, pointedly bending askew at verse's corner. And though youth smoked from his voice even before his debut, only wasting further away since, Cohen unabashedly squeaks high and groans low, testing every crack with shabby-genteel defiance. The '60s Cohen can be laughably icky, walking down the river with "Susanne" and Judy Collins, creating Hallmark bohemia with the instant standard "Bird  on a Wire," inducing pretentious teenagers to quote lyrics from "Teachers" in their yearbooks(ok, it was me). Still, Songs of Leonard Cohen tunes like "Master Song" and "The Stranger Song" are hardly coy about the vicious gender dynamics underlying the sexuall revolution.

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