REVIEW OF THE WEEK

Elliott Smith

(Anti-Records)

“Give me one reason not to do it,” sings the late Elliott Smith on his new posthumous release, and as most listeners will find (and as many reviewers already have), the temptation is strong to retrospectively read From a Basement on the Hill as a suicide note (suicide or not). Similarly, the fact that From a Basement was largely unfinished at the time of Smith’s death almost exactly one year ago will prompt many to carp and bicker over which bits are Elliott’s and which are the work of the debatably appropriate finishing team of Smith’s ex-girlfriend and ex-producer. Like Let It Be for the Beatles, this album will never really be Smith’s, and future generations won’t even have a McCartney to reclaim the reins with a ...Naked release thirty years later. But to dismiss this album at any epistemological level is to deny its sweeping power and beauty.

Smith’s discography’s slow movement towards over-production (or perhaps, brilliantly, production) which reached its peak with Figure 8 has been tempered here, and the results are sparkling. Songs like the opening “Coast to Coast” and “Don’t Go Down” are built on spines of distorted guitars and compressed, reverb-drenched drums and resonate with the album’s recurring sense of space and expansion, which, though in stark contrast to the linen-closet intimacy of his earlier releases, still make you feel like your seat is never too far from the stage. On the other end of the spectrum, songs like “Twilight,” painted over “Sun King”-like cricket-sounds, and “The Last Hour” work like red-pencil corrections to secret diary entries: ”I’ve been thinking of the things that I missed / Situations that I passed up for this /... / Make it over” he whisper-sings in the latter. In “Shooting Star,” reserved anger manifests itself through a screeching, treble-heavy and flanged guitar-line intro: ”You’ll make the scene like you always do / Going up stream down the avenue / To fuck some trophy boy that you’ll win tonight at the bar.”

Of course, it’s not perfect. Some tracks’ vocals seem like they might have been stronger after one more take, and if there is one singular quibble with the Smith-less mastering, it may be with the heavy use of ambient noises (epitomized in “Ostriches & Chirping”). But as a coda—by design or not—to a long and fascinating career, From a Basement functions superbly, and it does so in a way that continues to remind us of how much was lost a year ago.

—Drew Ashwood