Elliott Smith
Either/Or
Domino 1998

It would be hard for me to overstate how much I like Elliott Smith. He seems to attract extremely devoted fans (I’m avoiding the O-word) and I have to admit I’m close to being one of them, though I haven’t sent in any drawings of him to the fan site yet... (Sweet Adeline, actually a very good site). Anyway, I’m writing about this record first because it’s my favourite.

Either/Or is generally seen as a transition between the acoustic bedroom recordings of Roman Candle and Elliott Smith, and the more instrumentally filled-out XO, but to me it’s poised in a place that’s just fine and preferable to the Beatlesy pop sounds of XO and Figure 8. He’s still very much in the singer-songwriter mode, but the guitar isn’t all acoustic and there’s often percussion and some kind of synthesiser or organ adding a harmony in the background. It amazes me how something as well worn as a set of chord changes and a vocal line can still have such strange and beautiful effects, but somehow they do. He’s a brilliant songwriter and the sparseness of the music here allows it to shine.

Maybe I should confess that this is a trauma record for me, one that kept me going through bad times. It’s easy to see why. Damn, what a lyricist he is. Messed up relationships, alcoholism and alienation are investigated with a light touch. (His dad’s a psychiatrist.) ‘Between the Bars’ is a good example, sketching out an alcoholic relationship and just what it is that the drinking achieves. Or ‘Alameda’, about the person who keeps himself safe from heartbreak by never letting his lovers close. ‘Angeles’ is a particular favourite, partly because of the lyrics: it’s never explicit what the con on offer is, and partly I love the sound on it. The organ sounds like a finger on a wineglass.

His reputation has him down as a gentle, sensitive soul and there’s a fragility to the vocals and guitar which bear it out, but there’s anger in the lyrics too. (Apparently he has a habit of getting into fights.) Here it adds a good dose of tension.