The first review I wrote for this site was a short piece covering Joe Strummer’s final album, the solidly-decent Streetcore. It has been nearly a year since I wrote that review, but even through the mists of alcohol and drug abuse that accompany the College Experience®, I don’t remember it being an especially difficult review. I never had much of a personal connection with Joe Stummer, and though his death seemed rather untimely, I was by no means distraught. Elliott Smith is another story altogether.

There is something about Elliott that blows me away every time I listen to any of his albums (and I do this with an alarming regularity). His ability to express emotions with a mix of unnerving bluntness and sublime beauty has never ceased to amaze me. No other singer-songwriter of his generation can come close to matching his ability to write absolutely heartbreaking lyrics and couple them with perfect, simple melodies. Try and think of one, really. To my mind, Will Oldham would be the closest competition, and while he certainly has his moments, not even I See a Darkness (1999) or Viva Last Blues (1995) can touch Elliott. Hayden? Badly Drawn Boy? Chan Marshall? Sufjan Stevens? Please, these guys range from painfully derivative to vaguely promising (come back and talk to me when they have released a string of four near-perfect records or even have written a song on par with “Between the Bars”). Even Figure 8 (2000), Smith’s weakest album, trumps most of the competition.

Of course now it’s 2004, and we have to talk about what Elliott Smith was, which makes From a Basement on the Hill all the more painful. The album is, in short, phenomenal. It certainly doesn’t match the beauty and heartbreak of Either/Or (1997), but it manages to recapture the spirit of that record while properly articulating the orchestration that Elliott had been working with for Figure 8 and XO (1998). Rob Schnaph and Joanna Bolme’s production work is questionable at a few points, and the frequent jumps between lush production and the sparse sound that characterized Elliott’s first three albums make Basement a bit jarring at first, but the songs more than carry the weight.

The album’s opening sequence is its main misstep. “Coast to Coast,” despite boasting a few good lines, is one of the album’s weaker tracks. The song does provide a good measure of the sort of bitterness that Elliott shows through much of the album (this ought not to come as much of a surprise to fans), and it’s good to hear him writing a song that plays well with heavy guitars and full instrumentation. “Let’s Get Lost” is a pretty little song, but the lyrical content is a bit light and the track doesn’t really stick. Don't worry, though; the album just gets better from here.

The album version of “Pretty (Ugly Before)” doesn’t stray from the original 7” version, and the more I listen to it, the more I like it. His lyrics (“Sometimes is all I feel up to now") reflect a sad longing that he always seemed far too adept at capturing. Then there's “Don’t Go Down,” Elliott’s best straight-up rock number on the album. Working off a slow blues riff, he conjurs a relationship narrative where he plays both savior and saved. The resigned, sad-sack “Strung Out Again” plays off a terrific arrangement, and Smith’s level of imagery is more than his previous albums have led us to expect of him.

There are a number of songs on this album that I think could stand as true Elliott Smith classics--- songs along the lines of “The Biggest Lie,” “Between the Bars,” “Needle in the Hay,” “Say Yes,” “Waltz #2,” “Last Call,” “The White Lady Loves You Most,” “2:45 AM,” or even “Independence Day." Songs that are just so perfect, so striking, that they stand a step above just about everything else out there in the field of modern music. For instance, I believe that “A Fond Farewell,” in my mind the best thing on Basement, may be accepted into that list. Smith’s simple, quiet arrangement lays the groundwork for his vicious, self-loathing, Either/Or-caliber lyrics. When he sings, “The cold comfort of the in-between / A little less than a human being / A little less than a happy high / A little less than a suicide / The only things that you really tried,” I can’t help but think that somebody should have been monitoring his mental health a bit more carefully. It may be a little more subtle than "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die," but not by much.

Of course, Smith proceeds to follow it with two songs that may well also make the list. “King’s Crossing” is bound to be trumpeted for the lyric of, “I can't prepare for death any more than I already have,” but the song is exceptional in both its full orchestration and great writing---the reference to “The White Lady Loves You Most” is an especially nice touch. “Twilight” is another lovely song; though the lyrics aren’t especially deep or profound, there is a beautiful simplicity to the sad, regretful desire of the song that wins you over.

“Passing Feeling” and “Last Hour” make a nice pair, but both tend to just lead again and again to speculation about Smith’s suicide; it's sort of hard not to read a lot into the lyrics, after all. “Passing Feeling” looks at a relapse into drug addiction, and the desperately sparse “Last Hour” chronicles the end of a relationship. His lyrics of, “I'm through trying now / It's a big relief / I'll be staying down / Where no one else gonna give me grief / Mess me around / Just make it over,” seem especially hopeless---though it's a misery that certainly has its share of company.

“Shooting Star” is another piece of classic Elliott Smith songwriting, showing him lashing out at yet another lost lover. The song succeeds in no small part because of the great orchestration that Smith devised for the track, choosing to build to a huge finale rather than fade out quietly. Neither “Memory Lane” nor “Little One” particularly stand out, though Smith’s George Harrison influence has never come across quite so strongly than on the latter.

The album closes with the vicious “A Distorted Reality is Now a Neccesity to Be Free.” A few weeks ago in a review of the recent Barsuk compilation Future Soundtrack for America I may have come off as somewhat ambivalent about this song. I want to make it clear that despite my preference for the general production of the 7” version of this song, and my dislike of the “shine on me baby” line, this is nonetheless a great track. For his final song, and at some point he must have known it would be, Smith decided to just give the finger to the world. “I'm floating in a black balloon / O.D. on Easter afternoon / My mama told me/ 'Baby stay clean there's no in between,’” he sings, before laying into the people for whom, “Between's all you've ever seen or been.”

It’s hard to write about that last song as Smith’s final outing. His family has declared that From a Basement on the Hill will be the last proper release, despite the existence of more recorded material (Basement was originally intended as a double album). It’s hard to argue with too many of Bolme and Schnaph’s choices here. Many of them were taken from Smith’s notes and lyrics while he was working on the record, although some over the overdubbing and layering can become obnoxious and detract from the songs. It would be interesting to hear the songs as they were at the time of Smith’s death—by all reports very near completion. What the album undeniably manages to do, however, is to settle the balance that Smith always worked at between lyrics and arrangement. It neither sacrifices songwriting in favor of orchestration (Figure 8’s sin) nor relies solely on Smith’s harrowing lyrics and only simple guitar work (see: Roman Candle, 1994).

I did not expect another XO from Elliott, and I would have been happy with a Figure 8. The prospect of more music from Elliott was enough to make me water at the mouth. That his final project turned out so well (and I do believe this is his best album since Either/Or and a true return to form—whatever that means now) is both surprising and greatly reassuring. There are few artists who can do so well in the post-mortem, and it’s sad to think about how much more he could have achieved with his life. Rest in peace, Elliott.