When Elliott Smith's final studio record, From a Basement on the Hill, was released in 2004, some people wanted to avert their eyes. It emerged in the aftermath of his stabbing death the year before, during which the shock over his gruesome death was compounded by troubling revelations. We were hearing about spiraling drug problems, ambiguities in his autopsy, and his fraught relationship with his family. For Smith's hardcore fans, the album's very existence was charged. Smith's family had assumed the task of completing the record and several contentious artistic decisions were made, including bringing in longtime producer Rob Schnapf and Joanna Bolme to finish a number of Elliott's songs that had been recorded as demos. At the time, the final result felt too hot to touch, and it remains the uneasy outlier in Smith's discography to this day.
It was a sad fate for what had been shaping up to be the most sprawling, ambitious record of Smith's career. Whatever troubles may have been plaguing his personal life at the time, Smith seemed thrilled at the direction his music was taking. In interviews, he exulted in having discovered a "big" sound that made sense for him-- one that squared his expanding ambitions with his demand for pin-drop intimacy. His previous record, Figure 8, coated his songs in a blinding sheen that suited him as poorly as the rumpled all-white tux he'd worn to the Oscars. Basement saw him recoiling from that polish without abandoning his dream of a bigger sound, and whatever else it might be, it's the most complete document we have of the music he was hearing in his head those final years.
The opening of "Coast to Coast" immediately gives us an idea of the changes Smith had in mind. After 40 seconds of haunted carnival music, a brambled wall of guitars presses in from all sides, with Smith's wounded tenor emanating weakly from the center. Everything feels uncomfortably, purposefully too-close; with mics pressed up against the instruments, every twitch and scrape is crystalized. The mix is startlingly vivid: When the first guitar is strummed on "Pretty (Ugly Before)", the chord doesn't ring so much as bloom, suffusing the song with soft light. "Strung Out Again" is a lurching waltz, with Smith's guitar lines creaking and stumbling into wrong notes. Elliott's voice, in this context, has never sounded lovelier or more ruined. No beautiful sound escapes without scars.
Smith wrote with painful economy and eloquence about his own shortcomings, and his words cleaved through bullshit with bracing force. During the Basement on the Hill sessions, he began writing about his drug problems and depression with an unprecedented clarity. It seemed like an implicit rise to the challenge he posed himself in "Strung Out Again", where "Just looking in the mirror/ Will make you a brave man." He sings calmly and directly about terrifying scenarios. After years of rehabilitation and relapse, he had boiled the exhausting cycle of lifelong addiction down to eleven brutal words: "Took a long time to stand/ Took an hour to fall."
The context is part of the reason listening to From a Basement on the Hill felt somewhat indecent in 2004. Now, Kill Rock Stars is re-releasing the album alongside a remastered reissue of his 1994 debut, Roman Candle, situating the two records as bookends to an extraordinarily fertile career that may even help the volatile Basement on the Hill settle in more comfortably alongside the rest of Elliott's work.
Roman Candle, for its part, remains a fan favorite, and it contains some classic Smith songs: "Condor Ave", the title track, and "Last Call", in particular. And yet it mostly serves to point to all that Elliott would later become. It's wispier and more diffuse than his self-titled or Either/Or, and nothing here is as indelible as "Needle in the Hay", "The Biggest Lie" or "Ballad of Big Nothing". A few of the "No Name" song sketches drift in and out without leaving much of a mark-- Smith's music would become fuller, and his harmonic language more confident, on subsequent albums. The sound is there, though, unmistakable from the first note: the defeated whisper of the vocals, the deceptively intricate guitar work, and the angry little mantras ("leave alone, leave alone, 'cause you know you don't belong here"). From these beginnings, Smith would experiment with how much he could add to this framework without crushing it; on From a Basement on the Hill, he found a thrilling new plateau. Sadly, we can now only imagine where he would have gone from here.
