Pontificating at length about the colossal sadness of Elliott Smith's discography might seem reductive or stupidly obvious, but "sad" still stands as the single most accurate label ever slapped onto any of the late singer/songwriter's records. Smith's melancholy is big, pervasive and suffocating: see strummed chords and meekly mewed verses coated in thick, gloppy layers of heartbreak, lyrics hanging heavy with cold defeat, vocals seeped in doom. Even the simplicity of Smith's songs can be oddly disheartening-- the pretty bits always conceal grim, prickly underbellies, with Smith's melodic lightness tempered by the very worst kind of self-alienation.
Pop music has enjoyed a long and tenuous relationship with sadness-as-aesthetic-anchor, and Elliott Smith's role in that lineage was obvious from the start. It was forever preserved the moment that an obviously misplaced Smith stumbled onto the Academy Awards stage sporting an awkward, ill-fitting white suit. Now, nearly a year after his presumed suicide, Elliott Smith has come to occupy a painfully specific spot in our collective pop memory, curled up alongside spiritual brethren Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake-- all somber songwriters who realized their artistic ends in hideously relevant ways, fulfilling every last one of the dismal prophecies they wrote themselves into. And, as with Cobain and Drake, the most devastating part of Elliott Smith's death wasn't the knife slammed deep into his chest, but the bland inevitability of that motion-- how nobody was surprised, how things felt so "validated," how it was disgustingly appropriate, how we were all just waiting for it.
Unsurprisingly, From a Basement on the Hill-- Smith's posthumous sixth solo album-- doesn't break form: Released uncomfortably close to the one-year anniversary of his death, the album is riddled with helpless proclamations and self-incriminating taunts, clanging guitars and foggy, jumbled arrangements. Like nearly all of Smith's records, From a Basement covers his despair in sweet, perky, folk-pop kisses; and yet the album is still the saddest thing you'll hear all year. Smith's gloom may be romanticized into gold, but what's ultimately most harrowing about his unhappiness is its nastiness-- and that same gritty, uncompromising accuracy is also what makes his records so impossibly urgent, so uncomfortable and desperate. Reality is splattered all over From a Basement on the Hill-- dissonant guitars that sometimes coalesce and sometimes clash, vocals that flit from beautiful to strained, lyrics that range from clever to pedantic, production choices that hop maniacally from right to wrong.
For whatever reason, Smith's happier moments have always felt a little meaner than his darkest. They're somehow more smirking and cruel, as if they'd been put in place as pure provocation. Even the lightest tracks here (see the excellent "King's Crossing", or the barely-there "Memory Lane") are bogged down by their own sense of inevitability, or maybe by our own-- it's almost impossible not to judge From a Basement on the Hill without first acknowledging the complicated context of its release, cringing at its song titles, and promptly biting back presumptive words like "foreshadowing."
Supposedly, Smith had finished most of the work on From a Basement before his death last October, and the completed tracks were posthumously compiled by his immediate family and mixed by one-time girlfriend/present-day Jicks member Joanna Bolme and longtime producer Rob Schnapf ("final production" is credited only to "Elliott's family and friends"). And perhaps surprisingly, From a Basement on the Hill is perfectly coherent and cohesive, without any sense of being slapped together from half-finished parts. The record even boasts a classic Smith opener, the booming and majestic "Coast to Coast", which swells in and out in a haze of guitar ping and found sound murmurs. Collaborating again with former Heatmiser bandmate (and current Quasi member) Sam Coomes, "Pretty (Ugly Before)" weds tinkling piano with goofy guitar bits and lyrics that are somehow equally disheartened and optimistic ("Sunshine/ Been keeping me up for days/ There's no nighttime/ It's only a passing phase").
Still, the most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans. It's likely that Elliott Smith will be resurrected and rediscovered countless times over, and that his suicide will become as big a part of his legacy as his discography, feeding the mythology, informing the songs. But while From a Basement on the Hill will certainly have a place in that tradition, its impact will prove a stark contrast to his most affecting work.
