Oh well, okay (Elliott Smith) (LP 3818 - 3820)

Elliott Smith  XO (CD, Dreamworks Records, 1998) *****  

Elliott Smith  Figure 8 (CD, Dreamworks Records, 2000) ****  

Elliott Smith  From a Basement on the Hill (CD, Anti Records, 2004) ***  

Genre: Indie pop, indie folk  

Places I remember: HMV, Fopp

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Bottle Up and Explode! (XO)

Gear costume: Better Be Quiet Now (Figure 8)

They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6

Active compensatory factors: Elliott Smith was a gifted musician who tragically took his own life in 2003. He was a member of Heatmiser for five years before embarking on a solo career in 1993/94. I don't have his first few solo albums, so we start with album #4 - XO, and the first for a major label - Dreamworks.

It's a gorgeous pop record - full of great tunes with Elliott's terrific lead vocals (often multi-tracked) providing an immediate dreaminess to the sound. Those inspired Beatley harmonies are a strong factor in my appreciation as well (try I Didn't Understand for instance).

Figure 8 was the last album released in his lifetime. He described it as "more fragmented and dreamlike", so it's hard not to hear it in those terms. Aside from those amazing harmony sequences, it sounds tougher to me, rather than dreamlike, but that's just me, I guess. 

The first posthumous release was From a Basement on the Hill. Planned as a double album, it was incomplete at his death. AllMusic says:  All of his trademarks are here -- his soft, sad voice, a fixation on '60s pop, a warm sense of melancholy -- delivered in a strong set of songs that stands among his best.

It certainly is the heaviest sounding of the three.

Where do they all belong? Elliott Smith was a creative guy who suffered in his short life - drugs and depression, and his death was tragic. He'd left behind an amazing sequence of albums. I'll be on the lookout for those first four albums for comparison to these last three. Plus: Heatmiser, an interesting alt rock band, have their own catalogue that is worth looking out for.