Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Although I am older than I seem
At least I have some hopes and know to dream
…
You only have so long to live
So surround yourself with friends who can forgive

- “Heavier Than 3 Lbs.”

Remember that band in high school that was sooooo good you just couldn’t figure out why they weren’t huge?  That’s A Man About A Horse…except now they’re not sleeping with your girlfriend because they’re half your age.  On second thought, they’re probably still sleeping with your girlfriend.

The feel of this album is that of youthful exuberance so contagious you can’t help but look forward to everything before you in life.  If the world has produced this out of a set of kids, how can the upcoming generation of musicians, nay, artists, inventors, and statespeople, not completely change everything for the better?

That’s the sort of generational belief an album like this instills.  Every listen reveals some new point of excellence.  There are ten great songs, all with an inventive style that keeps things fresh and hooks that won’t leave you alone spread over 40 minutes of well-structured composition.  The lyrics are just as fantastic and varied.  You’d think that the “how do you talk to girls” song had been overdone, but vocalist Josh Castillo makes you think he’s the only guy who’s ever had trouble with the ladies on “Body Trembles.”  Then there’s the genius simultaneous punch to the gut, slap to the funny bone, and scratch to the head of “Purple Leaf”: “I have only one thing that I can truly give to you/If I could be so bold/It’s not my heart or some bullshit cliche line like that/It’s worth more than my heart/It’s a single purple leaf that grows beneath the Ponderosa tree.” The product really does belie the youth of its generators.

As good as it is, and it’s great, with 17 years between you and high school you can now start to hear maybe why these guys aren’t quite having money thrown at them just yet.  The sound is a little thin and unsatisfying, sometimes leaving a feeling of true greatness lying just out of reach.  Vocalist Josh Castillo’s voice is fine but he’s pushing his range here and can’t always get to where he wants to go.  I find that effect endearing and part of the whole contagious youthfulness thing, particularly on the amazing “Hopeless Bird,” but now I understand it’s not a recipe for general audience success.

It’s still a little mind-boggling that these guys aren’t monster huge, though.  There’s clearly enough talent here to garner widespread appeal.  Camille Paglia has said that rock musicians are America’s greatest resource, and she’s probably right.  Technology has gone a long way toward more efficient development of those resources, but for the second time this year I find myself torn between elation at having discovered a true gem in a sea of mediocre music and cynicism at how hard it is for truly great bands to get their deserved spoils.

Rating:
  
Mixers: “Heavier Than 3 Lbs.,” “Hopeless Bird”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Malfunkshun (Friendship Ring) and Marilyn Manson (Lunchbox)

I won’t make promises I know I cannot keep

- “Beautiful Girl”

Anything reminiscent of Pigs In Space has to be good.  Other than the name of the band, though, the only thing this recording has in common with that Muppets Show sketch is that it hearkens back to a 70’s subculture.  There’s a little sci-fi in here, but just enough to recall the spaced-out, swaggering riffs of this album’s targeted subculture flashback: British glam rock circa T. Rex.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who’s singing on this disc.   While the Langdon brothers are the credited vocalists, they channel Mick Jagger on “Anonymous” and Axl Rose on the album’s highlight, “2nd Avenue,” and they do an amazing impression of Michael Stipe on “Almond Kisses.”  Wait, that actually is Michael Stipe…wow, that makes it even harder.

But that’s about the only thing that’s hard about this disc.  It struts right out of the speakers with its leather pants and flashpots from the get go, ripping off a soaring guitar solo here, adding chorused vocals there.  It’s all immediately in your face, completely unashamed of what it is.

Unfortunately it blows its wad a little early, like a 19-year-old boy pulling out every trick he knows on the first f**k.  It doesn’t make it any less good, its just that on the fifth go-around the thrill is a little bit gone, the promise slightly unfulfilled as you realize, oh yeah, I did get it all the first time or two…that was great.  This is an album you wish wouldn’t have called after that first encounter so you could have in your head how great a long-term relationship would have been instead of the disillusionment, albeit an enjoyable one, you’re now stuck with.

Rating:
  
Mixers: “Goodbye Violet Race,” “Mungo City,” “2nd Avenue,” “Carry On”
Non-keeper: “Skylark”
Filed Between: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut soundtrack and Sparks vs. Faith No More (“This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us”)

Little things that just don’t matter
Still could get me mad as a hatter

- “Hot Shit”

Quasi either took a sharp left turn on this record, or I just wasn’t paying close attention before. In the past their lyrics seemed to lie firmly in fantasy, describing Seuss-like worlds where fluent animals in unlikely situations acted out impossible and nonsensical scenarios. There’s a little bit of that on Hot Shit!, but the lyrics are now much more strikingly and overtly political.

Released in 2003, the anti-war message is inescapable. Explicit insults are handed out to W and the administration in “White Devil’s Dream” and the 9/11 imagery of “Seven Years Gone” is unambiguous. Here, though, lyricist Sam Coomes still does let the esoteric creep in by assigning playground nicknames to members of the cabinet. “Seven Years Gone” also seems to foreshadow Bush’s political isolation at the end of his presidency by drawing a comparison between him and The Flying Dutchman, while  “Master & Dog” excoriates both parties as “the elephant wields the rod while the donkey throws you a bone/I’d rather have a bone than a beating I suppose,” in lyrics that are applicable at times when Democrats are in power, too. By the end of the song, Coomes goes the full kill-‘em-all, all-politicians-are-corrupt proletariat route and throws up his hands at the whole system: “Master is the country squire/And the housedogs lay by the fire/But it gets pretty hard for the dogs in the yard.” As much as I try to make lemonade out of our political system, it’s hard not to let these lyrics resonate as our squires let yard dogs without health care die every day…to take the analogy to its non-poetic ends.

Things changed far more for Quasi lyrically than they did musically onthis release. Take away the lyrics and this fits right in with their previous catalog. What Quasi does best they do even better here, namely mix dissonance and atonality into wonderfully crafted pop songs in a way that’s impossible not to notice but is also very appealing. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this band to anybody that liked catchy melodies and safe music, but they push the boundaries everywhere. They’re like the perfect introduction to experimental music.

In the past the band has tended to separate these two elements, leaving an abrasive song here and a song from The Beatles’ lost tapes there. On this disc, though, it’s all put together perfectly. Every song is the perfect mix of everything Quasi does and the album itself is crafted without flaw, with each song being the perfect one to follow the one it does, resulting in what might be the most palatable middle finger to consonance of all time.

Rating:

Mixers: “Seven Years Gone,” “Drunken Tears,” “Mama Tried,” “No One,” “Good Times”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Quasi’s The Sword Of God and Queen (The Platinum Collection)

I can’t get that sound out of my head
I can’t even figure out what’s making it

- “I Would Hurt A Fly”

When we last heard from Built To Spill in this little corner of the Web, we reviewed the band’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and said that band leader Doug Martsch needed to more fully embrace the catchy melodies he had a such a knack for writing. Of course, I was saying this fifteen years after the album’s release, so it should be no surprise, even if musicians did give my criticism the considered weight it deserves, that twelve years ago Martsch went in completely the opposite direction for that album’s follow-up, Perfect From Now On.

In the end, it’s probably a good thing, as this is a significantly superior effort. It helps that Martsch improved a different strength mentioned in that review, his guitar playing. Turn it up, because this is an album best listened to at high volumes, where, at the climaxes of many of these tracks, you can let his three guitar lines wash over you and, just when you’ve had enough, feel the sweet relief of a moaning cello, soothing you just enough to prepare you for the next onslaught of Martsch’s six-string wall of sound. This is one of those albums that’s best to listen to drunk, when your ears aren’t working so well. By increasing the volume and altering your perception, it’s like you can hear a different sonic intent.

This is a disc of well-connected moments, and the more you listen, the more moments you hear, the more vividly you hear the previously heard moments, and the more well-connected they all become. From the vivid evocation of eternity in the opening track to the pumping grooves at the end of the seductive builds on “I Would Hurt A Fly,” “Stop The Show,” and “Velvet Waltz,” with the middle song’s dismissive take down of music critics, to some of the best drumming I’ve every heard on “Kicked It In The Sun,” where “we’re special…in ways our mothers appreciate,” to the glorious battle between the harmonic progression of the band and the stubbornly static guitar of the final track, this album intrigues at first and seems to change and surprise with every listen thereafter.

To get a sense of just one of those moments, here is said evocation of the afterlife from “Randy Describes Eternity.” Imagine these lyrics bleeding out slowly at a measured, determined pace:

Every thousand yearsThis metal sphere
Ten times the size of Jupiter
Flies just past the Earth
You climb on your roof
And take a swipe at it
With a single feather
And you do it once every thousand years
Until you’ve worn it down to the size of a pea
Yeah, I’d say that’s a long time
But it’s only half a blink in the place we’re going to be.

What a sense of scale: thousand years, ten times the size of Jupiter, single feature, pea, half a blink. The content isn’t all of it, either, as the anxiety-filled, rocking (in the chair sense) arrangement followed by the narrator’s insistence on achieving nirvana though mistake-free living adds even greater gravitas to the situation, bringing me back vividly to dogmatic and illogical but well-intentioned Sunday mornings of my youth.

This album still has some of the problems of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love. It’s definitely got a same-key problem, which is likely because Martsch’s vocal range is about 90% of an octave. Certain hooks still come back once or twice two often, and all but pretty much the last track features the same structure. They all start mewly and slow, feature a big build somewhere in the second or third minute, then rock it out until the end with an optional breakdown in the middle…all just to repeat again on the next track. It’s a great formula, but it’s formulaic, y’know what I’m saying? Still, those weakenesses are far less glaring here than they were on the previously reviewed album. There’s Nothing Wrong With Love was very good. This is great.

Rating:

Mixers: “Stop The Show,” “Untrustable/Part 2 (About Someone Else)”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and Bulgarian Women’s Choir (Tour ’93 – Melody Rhythm & Harmony)

Is there anything I could do
That someone doesn’t do for you?

- “Coast To Coast”

This is a tough album to review, as it’s the one Smith was working on at the time of his tragic death. His former producer finished it off with the help of his former girlfriend and bassist (that’s one person), and it was released almost exactly one year after he died. A darkness encompassed it for a while, but after listening enough to get past that pall I was rewarded with yet another fantastic set of songs.

Figure 8, this album’s predecessor, got more attention, and kind of served as Smith’s breakthrough, but listening through the four albums of his I now have, Figure 8 is a bit of a lull on the way from where he was on XO to where he was here. Here he has the more varied instrumentation and huge sonic sledgehammers (“Don’t Go Down,” “Strung Out Again,” and “King’s Crossing” alls feature giant guitar waves socking you in the gut) of Figure 8 combined perfectly with the heart-wrenching falsetto of XO.

While a great album, this album still falls just short of the stratosphere reserved for higher ratings, in part because, like Figure 8, it takes a bit of a nosedive for about the last third, with “Little One” being a complete throwaway, “A Passing Feeling” featuring a too-strident piano, and “The Last Hour” making you work too hard to find its delicate melody inside of its sniveling exterior. Still, this doesn’t end all bad, as “Shooting Star,” which I’m pretty sure is about a girl I dated in college, carries the entire second half:

Going up some stream
To fuck some trophy boy…
When it was me
I was momentarily proud
Drunk on dreams
…
No one gets off with you very long
‘Cause you don’t feel bad when you lie
…
Your love is sad, shooting star

The lesson here, clearly, is don’t f**k with Smith’s heart, as he’ll immortalize your evil in song. There’s plenty more amazing in the lyrics, like “Coast To Coast,” where the entire song is spent with a tough facade about how he’ll forget everything only to beg back in at the end, or “Twilight,” where he turns down a potential new love to stay with his current baby because, among other practical reasons, “If I went with you/I’d disappoint you, too.” He nails the short-form answer as well, with fantastic succint metaphors like a girl who was “cracked as The Liberty Bell” or his “heavy metal mouth.”

I’ve given all three of Smith’s albums reviewed on this blog four lunchboxes, and I’d probably give the same rating to XO, too, if I were to review that one. In some ways that’s not fair, but I’ve listened to them all again and stand by my ratings. Smith’s an elite songwriter with an amazing amount of emotion in his voice that carries his incredible melodies perfectly. He makes my guts weep…but there’s always a handful of songs on an album that keep it from my highest ratings. That said, if I were to rank the four I have, this one would probably be at the top, though Either/Or would be awfully close behind if not tied. Figure 8, while a very good album, would be my least favorite…too much weakness. There’s a very clear line between the top two and bottom two. This is a high four lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Coast To Coast,” “Don’t Go Down,” “King’s Crossing,” “Twilight,” “Shooting Star”
Non-keepers: “Ostrich & Chirping,” “Little One”
Filed Between: Smith’s Figure 8 and The Smiths (Singles)

Typical me, I started something and now I’m not so sure…

– “I Started Something I Can’t Finish”

Turns out I really like the Smiths, which is a surprise, especially considering there’s not a single member of this band named Smith, which was a huge f**king disappointment.  Anyway, I think it’s because even though the songs are all about being sad and lonely, lead singer Morrissey doesn’t spend much time being hesitant about it: he’s sad and lonely and wants to feel you up and he’s going to make sure you are aware of that, even if it means he’s going to have to perform the musical equivalent of following you around and breathily whispering his problems into your ear.  Or maybe it’s because the band just writes great songs.

It’s late and this is a greatest hits album, so without further ado….

“Hand In Glove” – this is my second-least favorite song on here, and if there’s a track where Morrissey is all timid about being gay, sad, and lonely, it’s this one.  At points it sounds like he’s forgotten they’re recording a song.

“How Soon Is Now?” – If you know one song by The Smiths, this is it.  “I’m lonely and I need to be loved/Just like everybody else does.”  I always thought this was Depeche Mode or somebody like that.  This song has that signature guitar wail…have any rappers used that?  They should.  More bands should cover this.  Huge and awesome.

“Shakespeare’s Sister” – Whoa whoa whoa.  Stop.  STOP!  This is awful, and an awful lot of awful.  This is like the day the band tried coffee or something.  Easily the worst song here.

“That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” – The narrator of this track is telling his friends that their jokes about people less fortunate than them aren’t funny, which hits close to home because if you ever say something like “grammar nazi” to describe somebody who’s persnickety about grammar or “recycling nazi” to describe somebody who is vigilant about recycling around me I will definitely point out the inappropriateness of using the word “nazi” in that context for the way it diminishes the true horrors of the Nazis.  This is a mediocre track until the “…and now it’s happening in mine” part, at which point the album ratchets it up to 4.5-lunchbox levels right up through the second-to-last track.  If “Hand In Glove,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” and “Shakespeare’s Sister” weren’t on here, or maybe even if two of them weren’t, this would probably be a 4.5-lunchbox album.

“Shoplifters Of The World” – I love this guit solo…it’s damned near glam rock.  T. Rex lives!

“Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me” – A perfect example of how Morrisey and The Smiths get their whiny, sad reputation: “Last night I dreamt/That somebody loved me/No hope – no harm/Just another false alarm.”  I can’t argue with the fact that these lyrics are blatantly dark, but let’s not forget that these songs are at least as good as the lyrics are depressing.

“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” – As a lousy song at the end of this album, this serves to be the thing that that one-night stand said right after the mind-blowing orgasm that served to make her a one-night stand.  Oh this hurts here.

Rating:

Mixers: “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “How Soon Is Now?,” “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” “Panic,” “Girlfriend In A Coma”
Non-keepers: “Hand In Glove,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Shakespeare’s Sister,” “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”
Filed Between: Elliott Smith (Figure 8) and Sneaker Pimps (cassette single “Tesko Suicide (LP Edit)” b/w “Post-Modern Sleaze”)

It’s hard to imagine how The Cutters could have followed up Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! any better than this. Consider that they were working with the impossible task of following up a near perfect album, the type of album that changes your outlook on life, the universe, and everything every time you listen to it. Following up an album as good as their first one is a recipe for disaster, a near certaintly that the next release will be at least disappointing if not a colossal failure. This follow-up, though, which was to be the band’s swan song, while not as good as their debut, boldly moves away from the sound of the original and still manages to be fresh, punchy, and catchy.

Here the band has left behind the sunny, poppy, transcendent bounciness of their first album to pursue a grittier, tougher, but most of all faster aesthetic. The songwriting chops are stil in prime form but the band really starts to grow into a sound that can be called punk. The drums push everything along at breakneck speeds, leaving the vocalist racing to keep up, with lines unfinished as she gasps for air to get ready for the next line. Guitar solos are jackrabbit, just-pound-out-the-notes exercises in brute efficiency. If Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! was the first two months of the flirting, seduction, and validation a newfound love, In The Valley Of Enchantment is the first attempt at a breakup, complete with yelling, crying, and throwing s**t at your head…all while being a huge turn-on that eventually ends in fantastic break-up sex that will prove to be the sole reason you stay together for the next two years.

This album is not as accessible as its predecessor, but it’s still far from esoteric. It gets better with every listen, though, and displays a greater maturity by not containing a single non-keeper (Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! had two). I pointed this out before, but it bears repeating: this band’s entire collection is available for free download in mp3 format. Do yourself a favor and get on it.

Rating:

Mixers: “(Back In The) 20th Century,” “Type A Girl,” “Postcards,” “Cigarette City”
Non-keepers: none
Filed Between: Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! and Cutting Through – Columbia Hard Music sampler

We’ll crucify the insincere tonight

– “Tonight, Tonight”

You and me both, Billy.

Can you be a fan of a band if you don’t like what is universally regarded as their best album? ‘Cuz that basically describes the love triangle between me, Smashing Pumpkins, and Siamese Dream. Smashing Pumpkins’ debut album, Gish, had me from the first time I saw one of its videos on 120 Minutes even though I found lead singer Billy Corgan to be an insufferable sufferer of rock star martyr syndrome. (His scolding of the audience when opening up for Red Hot Chili Peppers in St. Paul in November 1991 is seared in my brain.) Then Siamese Dream came out, and I thought, “Huynh, so that’s where he was going with that sound.” All of Gish’s vitality was replaced with slick production and by-the-numbers songwriting, all of the debut album’s energy was replaced with ringing chords designed to leave space for on-stage rock star poses. It sounded great, but was the sonic equivalent of the hot, vapid blonde that catches your eye at first but has nothing else to offer. So much lost potential….

You either rule or suck in my book, especially in those chapters written as high school merged with college, and with every Siamese Dream track played on the radio, which I think was every other song on the radio in the summer of 1994, Smashing Pumpkins further cemented their reputation in my mind as “suck.” That was that: dust off hands and banish their post-Gish output from my ears forever. (The wretched Corgan-produced Hole album Celebrity Skin didn’t help their case at all.)

And, really, the fact that I could write off a band once and be done with them was one of the only damping effects on my CD consumption. Which is why, now that I’m working through the S’s of J-mez’ collection and find myself face to face with another very good Smashing Pumpkins album, the one immediately after Siamese Dream, in fact, it’s still undetermined whether I’ll re-evaluate this evaluation process.

Given their status as rock giants in 1995, I’m surprised I didn’t hear more of this double-disc’s singles on the radio and revise my opinion earlier, but the only song I recollect is the merely decent “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” with its regrettably histrionic lyrics “Despite all my rage/I’m still just a rat in a cage.” (Do you think Trent Reznor and Billy Corgan would be best buds given their similar lyric styles, or would they hate each other because their martyr complexes are realized in such similar ways? They must have met at some point…hard to believe they never toured together.) But I’ve even managed to make some sort of peace with that song. The pity-me-the-rockstar lyrics still roll my eyes every time, but now that the rest of the album reminds me of PinkFloyd’s The Wall, the song takes on its role as this album’s “Comfortably Numb.”

In fact this album is quite reminiscent of that album whose lead singer loved to play the melodramatic martyr card and often drove full-speed over the edge of cliché. Now, this is no The Wall, but I couldn’t help be reminded of it, with its double disc-ness and alternately sweet songs full of fragile neediness; dreary, sorrowful dirges; and raging screamfests. Song order here is crucially important, just like the 1977 musical autobiography of Roger Waters. These discs were not meant to be listened to on shuffle, as the sonic arc is just slightly short of perfect (like almost everything in the CD era it could have greatly improved with a touch of trimming). The album’s opening and closing tracks are entirely mediocre but get kept for their role as mood-setting bookends. Lyrically, it’s got the aforementioned lead-singer-as-melodramatic-martyr, self-hatred, and even pigs (I know, that’s more Animals, but still it ignites a lot of The Wall-associated neurons). And as it turns out, Corgan himself set out to make “The Wall for Generation X.”

Corgan’s still awfully whiny, both in terms of timbral quality and lyrical content, but he’s not nearly as bad as he used to be. Or still could have been for that matter. “Muzzle,” one of the album’s best tracks, starts off oh-so-regrettably with, “I fear that I am ordinary/Just like everyone,” but then Corgan immediately saves it with what are probably his best lyrics on the album: “To lie here and die among the sorrows adrift among the days/For everything I ever said and everything I’ve ever done is gone and dead/…/Great loves will one day have to part.” Ah, now there’s the beautiful style of melodrama that makes me feel like I’ve still got that awful 17-year-old haircut (for the record, with no help from me it turned into a beautiful 18-year-old haircut).

The album takes a drastic turn for the worse during the second half of the second disc, but still, what you’ve got here is the intensity, life, and creativity of Gish, augmented with a daring use of musical styles (not all of which work…see “We Only Come Out At Night” for a huge clunk) and widely varying instrumentation in new and challenging ways (love the outrageously distorted handclaps on “Love”), all with the gorgeous production quality of Siamese Dream, wrapped up as what must add up to the band’s definitive statement. So can I be a fan of this band given my disdain for their biggest hit album? I’ll say I can, and I’ll write off Siamese Dream as a blatant money-and-attention grab, as a way for Corgan to introduce the world to his true musical statement: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.

Rating:

Mixers: “Jellybelly,” “Fuck You (An Ode To One),” “Love,” “Galpogos,” “Muzzle,” “Bodies”
Non-keepers: “To Forgive,” “In The Arms Of Sleep,” “We Only Come Out At Night”
Filed Between: Gish and Smile Empty Soul (”Bottom Of A Bottle” b/w “Every Sunday”)

Elliott Smith makes a critic’s job tough as he doesn’t mix things up too much different from album to album. (Heck, he hardly mixes things up too much from song to song.) So when I sit down to review what seems for him to be an arbitray collection of his compositions, I can’t talk about how he’s moved from there to here. All I’ve just got is the same description: mostly quiet songs, often with sparse instrumentation, delivered at a moderate tempo with a breathy voice.

It’s all good, or at least mostly good with a decent amount of very good thrown in, but for the life of me I would not be able to name one of his songs by ear, even at gunpoint and with a list of said songs in front of me. I like almost everything, but I guess what does set this album apart from his previous albums is that there’s very little that I super like.

Part of what falls into that super like category are the few places where Smith rocks it pretty hard. The album opener louds things up early with big orchestration about midway through, “L.A.” has an awesome rawk scratchy guitar bit…you know, the kind that comes on right before the huge, ringing chord, and “Can’t Make A Sound,” the album’s penultimate track, even does the epic build thing at the end, which gets the track kept despite a bleaker-than-bleak beginning. “Everything Means Nothing To Me” is really this kind of experimentation in a nutshell: a 2.5 minute ditty whose musical and lyrical material all gets presented in the first minute, but just when he’s got you hypnotized and forgetting about it, there’s a drum fill and modern key sounds start distorting the music and, under the right influence, everything around you.

In another development, Smith’s less self-hating here than he was on, say, Either/Or. Instead, he’s turned his meek delivery and incisive lyrics into the perfect misanthropic weapon: passive-aggression. “Somebody That I Used To Know” and “Easy Way Out” both basically boil down to, “Boy, that was really a shitty thing to do. I think you’re a bad person, but, you know, that’s okay.”

The album pretty much falls off a cliff almost three-quarters of the way through, right after “Color Bars,” but before that track is the album’s only true mix CD candidate…the only one that belongs in that category unconditionally: “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud?” It’s awfully close to being the Best Song Ever with its perfect encapsulation of every one of Smith’s tools: bitter lyrics, hauntingly beautiful melodies, and a subtle syncopated rhythm that puts a wonderfully pained sneer on your face all at once.

Rating:

Mixers: “L.A.,” “Stupidity Tries,” “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud?”
Non-keepers: “Junk Bond Trader,” “In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach),” “Happiness/The Gondola Man,” “Bye”
Filed Between: Smith’s XO and Sneaker Pimps (cassette single “Tesko Suicide (LP Edit)” b/w “Post-Modern Sleaze”)

It’s clichéd and all too easy to write about how sad and mopey Elliott Smith’s music and lyrics are, especially in light of his death, officially declared a suicide. But good god, you can’t get around it. There is some serious depression going on here.

It takes only until the second track until the self-hatred asserts its presence with all of its heart-sinking force. Everything is the narrator’s fault and/or the inevitable misery of life in “Alameda,” a gorgeous song sung with Smith’s trademark delicacy:

Nobody broke your heart
You broke your own because you can’t finish what you start
…
So now you see your first mistake
Was thinking that you could relate
For one or two minutes she liked you
But the fix is in
…
If you’re alone it must be you that wants to be apart

Musically, Smith is doing a lot, but not all, of what he would do the following year on XO. It’s predominantly whispered vocals over strummed solo guitar with some drums and bass mixed in here and there. Here he goes for the high notes more often instead of pulling back into falsetto as he does so often on this album’s successor. “Angeles” features keys and “Cupid’s Trick” comes out of nowhere to rock pretty hard and dissonantly near the end, shaking things up on an album that has quite a bit of the same-key/same-tempo problem going on.

If Smith is a little uncreative with his song templates, he more than makes up for that with his excellent songwriting. I love a good half of these 12 tracks, if not more. The aforementioned “Alameda” is followed up by the better “Ballad Of Big Nothing.” Two tracks later the album’s twin towers appear with the Beatles-y “Pictures Of Me” and the moperiffic “No Name No. 5,” whose out-of-tune guitar twists the dull knife that is the lyrics until the key change right before “Got a broken heart” elevates you to a new level of exhausting emoting. When Smith pushes out a simple f-word it feels so like so much sweet release and is infinitely more cathartic than all the faux rage on Ben Folds Five’s “Song For The Dumped.”

One of the best songs is the album’s last, “Say Yes,” which, as its affirmational title suggests, ends with a little bit of optimism…a light at the end of a long, dark, miserable tunnel.

…Instead of falling down,
I’m standing up
the morning after.
Situations get fucked up
and turned around
sooner or later.
…
She’ll decide
what she wants.
I’ll probably be the last to know.
No one says until it shows.
…
They want you
or they don’t.
Say yes.

I’ll leave the psychoanalysis of this song in this location to others. All I know is it is the perfect reward at the end of a very good but often fatiguing journey through despair.

Rating:

Mixers: “Pictures Of Me,” “No Name No. 5,” “Say Yes”
Non-keeper: “Rose Parade”
Filed Between: A Small Circle Of Friends, Germs (Tribute) and Elliott Smith’s XO