Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith

New Moon (Kill Rock Stars)

Elliott Smith made albums through which common threads wove: loneliness, surrender, love, alienation, addiction. His vulnerability swirled rather than standing still, each measure touching the core. Unlike his first posthumously released album, 2004's From a Basement on the Hill, in which Smith had been neck deep until his untimely death the previous year, New Moon is a 2-CD collection of mostly unreleased tracks recorded 1994-1997, the years during which Smith was the most poetic, beautiful, and real. A prolific songwriter prone to perfection and overloaded with (in)decisions, Smith left miles and miles of tape that barely had to be touched by Larry Crane in mixing. Touches of Smith's early-Nineties band, Heatmiser, jump up in the climactic "High Times" and jovial, ironic "New Monkey," as well as two Heatmiser tracks ("See You Later," "Half Right") rearranged solo. The familiar waltz of "Going Nowhere" and tender admittance of "All Cleaned Out" might as well have been on Either/Or (1997), while the early version of Good Will Hunting's "Miss Misery" speaks for itself. Big Star's "Thirteen" lucked out live dozens of times during Smith's life, but this is its debut on tape. The result is neither eulogy nor love letter. New Moon is a near yearbook, a simple reminder of the talent and fruition of Steven Paul Smith, friend, comedian, and one of the greatest songwriters of this generation.