Let me clarify...

Ok so in the last post about Elliott Smith, I realized I didn't cover all of his great music. I only really looked at the two albums from the middle of his career and ignored everything else, which really isn't fair to the catalogue from the rest of his career. With so many of these artists there is just so much to cover so I can't cover it all, but I think I'll make an exception with Elliott Smith, just to wrap it up. To briefly sum up what I think of his earlier and later works: I found his first two albums, "Roman Candle" and the eponymous "Elliott Smith" to be very acoustic and really showed his potential. There are no stand-outs from those albums but as entire albums they are quite good and are cohesive.

As for his later stuff, I have not yet heard the posthumous album "From A Basement On The Hill", so all I can comment on is "Figure 8". I liked Figure 8 quite a bit, but it was much more instrumentalized and less acoustic than his previous albums. In some ways that is a good thing though, because he was able to create more complex soundscapes to put his voice over. Some standouts from that album include "Happiness", "Easy Way Out", and "In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach)". The latter is particularly remarkable for his use of a honky-tonk piano to add a certain amount of surrealism to the song.

Well that about sums up Elliott Smith. A depressed man, but a brilliant artist.