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The first song on Brian Buckley’s For Her begins with a one and a half minute guitar solo that, surprisingly enough, both captured and held my attention. Buckley can wail on a guitar, to say the least, but there’s an intensity and urgency in those first few seconds of Little Pieces that suck a listener in and almost make his vocals pale in comparison.  I say almost because Buckley’s voice has its own character that set him apart from the run-of -the-mill Top 40 crooner.  

There’s an almost come-hither murmur to his vocal style that draws obvious comparisons to the similarly named Jeff Buckley, but doesn’t quite reach the levels of the late great. Still, just as he manipulates the strings to elicit the proper sound, Buckley can ply his voice to draw out just the right quality for each song. Whether it be a guttural howl on Wake Up or Bono-esque cries on In Another World (She Is Gone), he always seems to hit just the right note.

For Her is an album that was born out of tragedy after Buckley lost a friend to suicide, so lyrically it leans towards the melancholy, but it doesn’t overwhelm the work as whole. If anything, there’s an ironically mellow vibe that permeates the whole CD which adds to the overall jam-band feeling it exudes. The mellowness can get a bit repetitive while listening to the album in an iPod, but I wouldn’t doubt that seeing Buckley perform the same tracks live would be a totally different experience.

Repetition aside, there are standouts on the album and the frontrunner might just be the subtly seductive Ready For This Love.  Buckley croons in a sotto voce that adds veracity to the exhortation that he’s “ready for this earthshaking, earth-quaking kind of love.”  Simply put, For Her is a very guitar driven record, much like those by Santana, that showcases both Buckley’s instrumental prowess and vocal ability. As a debut album it’s not perfect, but it’s good and holds promise of even better things to come.