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Artist: Elliott Smith
Album: Elliott Smith
Release Date: July 21, 1995 (Kill Rock Stars)
Buzz Factor: 5/5
The first time I heard Elliott Smith, I was sitting in the backseat of a car packed with my friends, driving through Illinois cornfields on a cold winter night. Something about the song kept pulling me away from conversation, something about the bare voice and the honest simplicity of the guitar drew my ear unconsciously.
I didn’t know until months later that I had been listening to “Needle In The Hay,” after a friend gave me a CD-R of Elliott Smith when I asked him for some of his favorite albums in a desperate attempt get out of a musical rut. Still my favorite of his albums, Elliott Smith is the best proof of Smith’s ability to write songs that cut away the fat of surface level sentimentality. It touches that special, intangible emotion that makes you snidely smile when you find yourself stuck between disappointment and frustration. This album gives voice to the feeling that sneaks into the back of your head when you feel like you are constantly rejecting the ugliness you see around you while simultaneously struggling against the ugliness you see in yourself.
With the most confrontational lyrics on the album, “Christian Brothers” and “St. Ides Heaven” acknowledge the use of alcohol and drugs to try to mute the voices of personal demons as well as those of the people around that only cause frustration with their half-hearted help and selfish solutions. Alternatively, Smith sometimes assumes the role of the unsuccessful experimenter with temporary fixes to deeper dissatisfaction, warning against attempting to find some sort of solace in a syringe or in someone just as screwed up as yourself with songs like “Single File” and “Good To Go”.
Accompanied only by an acoustic guitar on the majority of the album, Smith’s soft and sincere voice becomes central, breathing life into lyrics that might sound self-pitying if sung by any other artist. Lines like “I’m a junkyard full of false starts” or “everything that you do makes me want to die” don’t sound sophomoric when sung by Smith, but rather appear sadly sagely. Neither sounding preachy nor whiny on Elliott Smith, Smith inspires the listener to empathize with his pain as their own rather than sympathize with a character in a second-hand story. The sparing production of the tracks on Elliott Smith allow for Smith’s talent as a songwriter to show unadulterated by a backing band or the layered vocals that were incorporated into his later recordings. Laced with stories of dependence and disappointment, the record provides the listener with a transient peace similar to that of the Smith’s drug addicts and luckless lovers that get a small taste of happiness in spite of harsh reality.
Ultimately, Elliott Smith attracts you back not because you think it is going to eliminate your fears and frustrations about life, love or loneliness, but rather because it makes you believe that those feelings are validated in some confused and inconclusive way by someone struggling to find contentment himself.