Death has that effect: it both fixes things in place and exposes the futility of fixing them.
In the end, it’s hard to pass any final judgment on the album, or on Smith. Somewhere between the acoustic balladry of “Either/Or” and the baroque pop of “Figure 8,” he began to sound like George Harrison, and he still does in other places, he sounds like Alex Chilton, if Chilton had never disbanded Big Star and continued to turn out beautifully hopeless pop in the downbeat vein of “Sister Lovers.” Some songs here are perfect, while others meander. So does the second song, and the third, and the fourth-in “King’s Crossing,” the brawniest, brashest point on the album, he admits, “I can’t prepare for death more than I already have.” This would be an academic exercise were it not for the fact that the record serves as a fitting memorial for Smith’s career. Like any pre-suicide note, the album will be subjected to intense scrutiny look no further than the first song, which imagines relieving pain with some instrument of oblivion, whether sleep or drugs or death. The Elliott Smith album “From a Basement on the Hill” (Anti-) wasn’t quite finished when Smith was found dead, late last year, of two stab wounds to the chest, evidently self-inflicted.
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