Elliott Smith

Because of his (apparent) suicide last year, Elliott Smith's mopey minions will be looking for even deeper and darker themes to the songs on his final album, From a Basement on the Hill. With titles like "Strung Out Again," "A Fond Farewell" and "Last Hour," you don’t have to look too hard to find songs about heroin addiction, loneliness and possibly even suicide. But you won’t necessarily find bleaker material here than on any of Smith's previous albums. It’s never really been a secret that Smith had a drug problem and that he leaned toward the darker side of life.

And this album is no different. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Elliott Smith, full of gorgeous, lush melodies, introspective and desperate lyrics, and even more hints of what this guy was fully capable of. The album features a few of his trademark beautiful-loser lullabies, as well as songs that break the conventions of a typical Elliott Smith album. "Pretty (Ugly Before)" is a great example of the aforementioned lullabies, an honest and heartbreaking sadcore anthem. But "King’s Crossing" and the opening track "Coast to Coast" show a side of Smith that we will sadly never see come to fruition, using a thunderous, crunching wall of sound that's surprising and almost frightening. My only complaint with the album is that it lacks flow, but that's probably due in part to the fact that the songs were compiled after Smith’s death.

Elliott Smith was arguably the finest singer/songwriter of his generation, and this collection of tracks fits nicely into an already robust catalog of impeccable songs. His talent and gift for melody set him apart from your garden-variety sadcore indie rocker. He was as much Paul McCartney as he was Nick Drake. You could slip his tracks into a mixtape for your mom and she’d be humming it after one listen. But of course you wouldn’t -- because if she ever listened to the lyrics, she’d be quite worried about you.

This is Elliott Smith’s last album, unless he becomes the Tupac of Indie Rock. I pray that doesn’t happen. This is a wonderful last album to have your name on. His music has been like a warm blanket of commiseration for a sad and frustrated generation. But there was always that hint of hope in his music. Elliott Smith said he was always surprised when people called his music sad, because playing it made him so happy. Listening to it, I feel the same way. - Doug Kamin

Almost exactly a year after his untimely death -- missing the anniversary by just two days -- Elliott Smith's final recordings were released as the From a Basement on the Hill album. Smith had been working on the album for a long time. His last album, Figure 8, had appeared in 2000, and when it came time to record its follow-up, he parted ways with both his major label, Dreamworks, and his longtime producer/engineer, Rob Schnapf, working through a number of different producers, including L.A. superproducer Jon Brion, before recording a number of sessions with David McConnell, which were supplemented with Smith's home recordings. At the time of his death, Smith was still tinkering with the album. There was no final track sequence and only a handful of final mixes; it was closer to completion than Jeff Buckley's Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which he intended to re-record, but it was still up to his family to finalize the record. For various reasons, the family chose to work with Schnapf and Joanna Bolme -- a former girlfriend of Smith and current member of Stephen Malkmus' Jicks -- instead of McConnell, who went on record with Kimberly Chun of The San Francisco Bay Area Guardian the week before the release of From a Basement to state that this album was not exactly what Smith intended it to be. According to McConnell, as well as Elliott Smith biographer Benjamin Nugent, Smith wanted the album to be rough and ragged, and McConnell told Chun that "obviously Elliott did not get his wishes," claiming that three of the songs on the album were considered finished by both him and Smith, but appear on the record in different mixes.

It's hard to dispute that Smith did not get to finalize the mixes, the track selection, or the sequencing -- he died, after all, with the album uncompleted -- but that's the nature of posthumous recordings: they're never quite what might have appeared had the artist lived. Critics, fans, and historians can have endless debates about whether this particular incarnation of the songs on From a Basement on the Hill would have been what would have been heard if Smith had finished the record, but that doesn't take away from the simple fact that the music here is strong enough to warrant a release, and that it offers a sense of resolution to his discography. While it's likely that From a Basement is cleaner than what Smith and McConnell intended, it is much sparer than Figure 8, and it feels at once more adventurous, confident, and warmer than its predecessor. Perhaps it's not "the next White Album," which is what McConnell claims it could have been, but it has a similarly freewheeling spirit, bouncing from sweet pop to fingerpicked acoustic guitars to fuzzy neo-psychedelic washes of sound. It's not far removed from Smith's previous work, but it feels like a step forward from the fussy Figure 8 and more intimate than XO. The most surprising twist is that despite the occasional lyrics that seem to telegraph his death (particularly on "A Fond Farewell"), it's not a crushingly heavy album. Like the best of his music, From a Basement on the Hill is comforting in its sadness; it's empathetic, not alienating. Given Smith's tragic fate, it also sadly seems like a summation of his work. 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 may or may not be exactly what Elliott Smith intended these recording sessions to be, but as it stands, From a Basement on the Hill is a fond farewell to a singer/songwriter who many indie rockers of the '90s considered a friend. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide