Moving from Radiohead to Elliott Smith is not an especially logical step. Christopher O'Riley recorded not one but two albums of Radiohead arrangements for solo piano-- True Love Waits in 2003 and Hold Me to This last year-- taking the melodies and moods out of their original headspace with renderings that dramatically departed from the familiar versions. It was interesting to hear a classically trained musician engage with the band's cerebral art rock in this manner, and his approach made for some compelling interpretations, even if a large part of the albums' appeal was the novelty of hearing songs like "2+2=5" and "No Surprises" in a concert-hall setting. Where Radiohead's music is experimental and open-ended, however, Smith is much more of a pop formalist, with absolute faith in verses, choruses, and bridges. On Home to Oblivion: An Elliott Smith Tribute these ordered elements don't translate very well to O'Riley's aesthetic-- and the lyrics don't translate at all-- revealing the leveling effect his style has on his subjects: These Smith interpretations sound too similar to his Radiohead covers-- nearly identical, in fact-- which seems like a failure of imagination considering how different these artists are.
As with his previous albums, O'Riley's impressionistic style doesn't capture melody very naturalistically. With Radiohead this weakness was less pronounced, but Smith's songs are all melody, so O'Riley's interpretations of "Everything Means Nothing to Me" and "I Didn't Understand" sound clunky and askew. The galloping pace of "Coast to Coast", while fine in the original, sounds rushed and manic in this setting, and "Independence Day" and "Stupidity Tries" trip headlong over their melodies. O'Riley starts "Speed Trials" with those same tense chords, which translate perfectly to piano and nicely set the tone for the song, but his arrangement sounds busy in its aimlessness, taking a long time to go nowhere in particular. Perhaps a simple, minimalist approach-- one hand playing a straightforward melody-- would have made this version of "Between the Bars" sound as elegant as the original instead of choppy and kitschy.
Nevertheless, O'Riley's method is commendatory and impressive in its meticulousness: He immerses himself in an artist's work, tracking down the rarest bootlegs and rarities with obsessive zeal. Home to Oblivion even unearths one track, "No Life", that wasn't even attributed to Smith when O'Riley found it online. The upside to this approach is that the pianist can give a broad overview of an artist without greatest-hits pandering. For example, he doesn't do popular songs like "Miss Misery" or "Waltz #2 (XO)", but he does perform lesser-known album tracks like "Bye" and "Satellite". As with his Radiohead albums, Home to Oblivion is a fan's tribute. The downside, however, is a head-in-the-sand reading of the artist, completely lacking criticality.
Perhaps it's due to the circumstances of Smith's death that O'Riley takes such a faithful tack on Home to Oblivion. He's preserving and even reinforcing the common perception of the late singer-songwriter as a classically tortured artist, damned by the same obsessions that seemed to make him exceptional. In his liner notes, O'Riley makes numerous comments about the "constant temptation of oblivion" in Smith's songs, even taking that idea as the title of the album (and doesn't that album title seem in poor taste?) This highly romanticized view of Smith did him no favors when he was alive, and it does him even fewer favors now that he's dead. Worse, this approach seems at best limited and at worse patently false, since Smith's demons, while finding expression in his music, were related less to his music than to his own depression and drug addiction.
But O'Riley's worst crime is altogether more pedestrian: simply put, Home to Oblivion is boring-- a word I typically try to avoid in reviews but seems apt here. The album's ostentatious tastefulness threatens to make O'Riley the Liberace of the indie set, and its practiced pleasantness makes it best suited for dinner parties and study sessions, where unobtrusiveness is both a necessity and a virtue. The album is background music not only because it can be easily ignored, but primarily because it has no foreground. There's nothing here to catch the ear, which makes O'Riley seem strangely oblivious to the challenges and rewards of Smith's music.
