If ever I take survey of how many Elliott Smith albums I have, I always have to remind myself to bump up the number by one, because I somehow always forget his posthumous album, From a Basement on the Hill. If there's any album in my collection I never really gave a fair chance to, that one is it, and since we just passed the one year anniversary of that album's release (October 19) and the two year anniversary of Smith's death (October 21), I figured I'd give it another chance to impress me, despite the fact that there are about 300 new releases from the past month that I want to hear.
Unfortunately, I don't really think any higher of it now than I did a year ago. The long layoff probably helped some of the songs stay fresh (it's probably been a good 10 months since I had it on), but some others sound worse with age.
First, the good parts: "Coast to Coast" and "Don't Go Down" are gritty rockers that seem much more appealing than they did before, with thunderous drumming courtesy of the Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd on the former. When I first these songs, I cringed because they "didn't sound like Elliott." At this point I'm ok with that, and if David Bowie can do all the things he's done and still be great, I can't really hold a decision to try to play some crunchy electric guitar-driven songs against Elliott.
The real problem is the ones that do "sound like Elliott." "Memory Lane" and "A Fond Farewell" can either be counted as self-parody or a lazy attempt to recreate old magic, and the same goes for "Pretty (Ugly Before)," "Strung Out Again," and "Let's Get Lost," especially the latter, with its introduction more or less stolen straight from "Color Bars," from 2000's Figure 8.
The really interesting aspect of this is trying to figure out if there's some reason outside of the music itself that I don't really like Smith's final album. Is it possible that no matter what was released, I would hear it and say that it wasn't what he wanted? That's a very distinct possibility, but I think the real reason is simply that I'm just not really a big Elliott Smith fan anymore. Even by the time Smith reached his unfortunate end two years ago, it'd been a couple years since I listened to any of his albums. I hung on to him for a little while after the Figure 8 fervor died down (in truth, I didn't really get into him until around when that album was released), but eventually moved on. I took note of the occasional updates on the progress of From a Basement on the Hill (which I think had a different working title and was originally to be 2 discs), but didn't really follow it with much interest. When he died, I briefly had another fling with Either/Or and XO, but neither of those nor any of the other ones get much play now. I'll always recall those albums fondly, and I still get enjoyment out of them the few times I do put them on (I actually have no idea where my copy of Either/Or is at the moment), but they'll probably hold more sentimental value than anything else.
My real "oops" moment was when I passed on what turned out to be my final opportunity to see him live to spend time with a girl I was dating at the time. We were both fans of Elliott (me more than her, even if she did hang on to my copy of XO for what seemed like a year), but she was in a different town, and Elliott was two miles away. If I'd known that the relationship wasn't going to last (although we are still good friends, and she still apparently admires my cat, as can be seen in the comments to the last post), and that Elliott Smith was going to kill himself four months later, I probably would have done things differently, but that's how things work out sometimes.
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