It’s easy to view Elliott Smith’s self-titled record as a premonition. After all, it’s an album largely defined by its place in retrospect. Remember, this was an Elliott Smith before “Between The Bars” and “Miss Misery,” before the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, and before all of it would catapult him into a spotlight that only seemed to expedite his undoing. Before all of that, there was the self-titled album.

Even after 25 years of acclaim and dissection, Elliott Smith still feels like an album that nobody was meant to hear. And, for a while, nobody did. Much like the ill-fated Big Star—the 1970s power-pop pioneers who were some of Smith’s biggest musical heroes—his earnest and confessional tracks were initially released into relative obscurity. Outside of his local scene in Portland, there wasn’t much of a reception for this record. But unlike Big Star, Elliott was still around by the time the rest of the world caught up, bearing witness to the realization of everything that this record forecasted. Again, Elliott Smith now looks like a premonition--of a once-in-generation voice primed to break into the mainstream, of a shift against a music industry that measured angst in decibels, and most importantly, of both the grand musical aspirations and immense personal demons held within its creator.

Sonically, subtlety is the key to the genius behind this album. The vast majority of this record consists of naked guitar and vocal, double-tracked and hard-panned in either channel. Whether this was an artistic choice or an artistic compromise is certainly up for debate; to be fair, Smith jumped on the opportunity to fulfill his larger, more orchestral ambitions as soon as he was given the budget to do so. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the intimacy of tracks like “Good To Go” or “The Biggest Lie” working with any other instrumental palette.

Despite the limited tools at Smith’s disposal, every song here has defining (and usually beautiful) sonic details that give each track its own distinct character. There’s the haunting harmonica drone on “Alphabet Town,” the mesmerizing finger-picked leads on “Southern Belle,” the harmony-laced peak of “Single File,” just to name a few. For track after track on this record, Smith finds immense power in simplicity, and his execution of DIY aesthetics gives Elliott Smith a sense of cohesion that elevates the album above its indie-folk contemporaries.

At the end of the day, though, it’s the songwriting that sells this record. These songs, man. They’re great enough in isolation, but absolutely devastating when placed in the context of one another. There’s a story to this album, but not in the traditional sense. Much like the front cover of the record, where two heavy-xeroxed human silhouettes can be seen falling from the roof of the building, there’s a grim opacity to the narrative Smith spins. We get some occasional backstory (the cycles of substance abuse on “Christian Brothers”), and a moment of tragic finality (“The Biggest Lie”), but most of the record finds Smith—just like those silhouettes—in a dreamlike, nightmarish, never-ending freefall.

Common themes bubble to the surface—dependency, doomed love, self-destruction—but Smith filters the album’s ultra-gritty subject matter through a surrealist lens, breathing new life into these ideas. Whether it’s the sardonic “Coming Up Roses” (“I’m a junkyard full of false starts / And I don’t need your permission / To bury your love under this spare light bulb”) or the desolate “The White Lady Loves You More” (“Need a metal man just to pick up your feet / It’s been a long time since you cared enough for me to even be discreet”), there’s a literacy on display here that makes these lyrics so affecting. At the best moments of Elliott Smith (and there are a lot of them), it feels like listening to a harrowing, strung-out Blonde On Blonde. I’m not sure that higher praise exists.

Beyond all the microanalysis, this is just an amazing singer-songwriter album. Sonically, lyrically, performance-wise, fucking everything-wise, Elliott Smith is stellar. The fact that I’ve made it this far without even mentioning “Needle In The Hay,” easily one of the best tracks of the ’90s, goes to show just how much the 37 minutes of material on this record have to offer. In a discography loaded with classics, this record might just be the purest, most cohesive project Smith ever put together. In so many ways, it’s the perfect microcosm of everything his career stood for; an artist who struck a generational balance between stunning beauty and immense tragedy. And it was never executed better than on Elliott Smith.

Rating: A

User Rating: Not Yet Rated

---

Comments